The memoirs are mostly the story about my stroke and the surrounding time in the efforts to help others, but it seemed fitting to write about life before the stroke to breathe more context into the story. Right now, I've written a couple chapters about the day of the stroke and the subsequently days at the hospital, but I've been working on a couple chapters about early life because, as I'm writing, it has been extremely cathartic and healing to write about difficult parts of your life. Hence, why I needed to stop it for a while. While it can be painful, I recommend every else to take the time to do the same.
Here is an excerpt of the rough draft of my memories of days at the beach with my mom ----
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My mother had a part-time job at the Parks and Recreation Department in the morning and she would dutifully come home by 12:15 pm. For me, if I wasn’t at art lessons in the morning, than I would likely be in front of the T.V. watching the countless episodes of I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, Brady Bunch or Three’s Company, followed by The Price Is Right, watching the hysterics of midwest housewives bidding on $6,000 cars and $150 refrigerators. When Bob Barker teased that the showcase showdown would be on next after the commercial, I knew that mom would be on her way home soon. At home, she would likely make herself a turkey sandwich with some Ruffles and a small pickle spear with a little RC soda before we would pile into the white, ’66 Ford Mustang on the days that we would take our 6 mile trek to the beach.
For our days at the beach, we spent them at Sea Bright, New Jersey - a sliver of land full of beach clubs, vacation bungalows, condos, restaurants and bars. My parents paid a membership in one of the beach clubs called Sea Bright Bathing Pavilion (SBBP - now Chapel Beach Club). It was one of the smaller clubs of the avenue, but charming and had everything we needed.
Coming through the front doors of the club, there was always a welcomed wind gust from the other side of the lobby, and ocean waves echoed on the walls in the room. After picking up our locker room key from an old, cranky lady who sat in the front office, I always had to walk gingerly on the slippery spanish tile floor. There were people with wet feet coming in and out between the ocean and the pool and so I always wondered why they had built the floor with such slippery tiles because I had found myself quickly, and many others, on my butt on several occasions after running through the lobby.
We were able to store our beach accessories and bathing suits in what we called “lockers”. The lockers were actual individual changing rooms, with floors made out of wooden planks and the doors and walls made with plywood and shingles on the roof. There was no electricity, so when you needed privacy to close the door, the sun light coming through the bottom of the door was the only light to lead you to your clothes. There were rows and rows of these cozy lockers.
After we scampered on the hot sand, we would stake our claim on the beach by stabbing the sandy earth with our umbrella. My mom always wanted to sit as close as we could to the ocean, tickling our toes by the alternating tides. Smells of the beach remind me of coconut oil, salty air, and chlorine and whenever I get a whiff of any of those I’m immediately transported onto the beach, my childhood beach, and my mind’s eye sees the childhood beach, full of virtue and purity, looming on the horizon of the Atlantic wherever I am. Sense of smell is the curator of all things abstract as we engage with our memories. So as to describe the beach, there is nothing more logical for me but to use the sense of smell to convey the scene to others. Coconut oil. Salty air. Chlorine. Smell them and you’ll know what I mean.
At the stake we claimed in the sand we situated our chairs, towels, bags, belly boards or anything else for our day of the beach. My mother usually spent most of her day reading on the beach while I vacillated between the large, Olympic-size pool and surfing the waves, timed by the lifeguards who whistled at the 40th minute of each hour to annunciate that it was adult swim, until we heard the next whistle at the top of the hour, knowing we could play again. I would play with friends from school and friends in other schools, and sometimes I played by myself and sometimes I would talk with a lifeguard. I do recall feeling lonely sometimes or from being slighted for some ridiculous pre-pubescent spat with another friend. There really isn’t much more to expound on the statement that, girls can be mean, every other female out there knows that. But I don’t know why I gave mean back sometimes, thus churning the fiendishly vicious cycle. I was extremely competitive and I’m sure the petty behavior could have had something to do with my own personality.
Although I was good at making up my own imagination on those days while I was lonely or being dismissed, days must have been very enjoyable in my mind somehow, so whether it was my creative imagination or from the fun with friends, the gauzy dreams in my mind of our days in the beach are very easy to recall.
Nice dreams.
It was always a nice end of the day when, my bronze skin became bronzer, the sand between my toes were showered off, the salty/chlorine mixture in my dirty blonde locks were combed, and when mom was in a good mood, the day would become even sweeter when she would finally give in to my pleas to take me to Dairy Queen on the way home. I always wanted either a simple chocolate cone or a hot fudge sundae. Always. My mom always wanted a Dilly Bar. Always. And I would watch the wind through the window of the Mustang, on the road near the banks of the Navesink, quickly licking the spiraling ice cream that looked like a helix before it melted onto the cone.
Nice dreams.
Lucky dreams.
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