June and the Shore
June is a beginning. June is my mother’s birthday. June is school out, sunscreen on, schedules wide open. June is when I go to say hello to the beach. I’ve heard that folks with country homes make a habit of going up in the spring to open the house, which I suppose means throwing open the windows and shaking out the rugs and watching dust molecules shift in large patches of sunlight. So when I go to the beach in June, I picture myself opening the beach, when all this means is that I sit on a wrinkled towel on cold sand in a long sleeve t-shirt and grin at the ocean. Just grin. “Hi,” I say out loud, unable to stop myself. The ocean is a lover that waited for me. The beach is a gift, one subway ride from my apartment. What is more magical than the beach?
I inherited my love of the beach from my mother. Growing up near Philadelphia meant that we were always just a two hour ride from the Jersey shore. There are stories about when my mother was young, and she would go to visit her cousins at the beach. She would ride with my uncle after his Friday shift, and she would roll down the window and stick her face to the wind as soon as sea air was even faintly present.
I learned to ride a bike at the Jersey shore. My mother had tried to teach me in the parking lot outside of my elementary school, but I’d pedaled into a pine tree and given up. Still, when we left for the shore, my father packed everyone’s bikes. We were lucky to stay with Uncle Don, who wasn’t my uncle, but was rather my father’s sister’s ex-husband’s uncle. Uncle Don was wheelchair bound, kind as a saint, and generous enough to let not one but two families with children come for a week or two every summer. On the drive to Seaside Heights, my mother would roll down her window when we got off the Garden State Parkway, and I started to do the same.
Uncle Don’s house had a big wrap around glassed in porch. As I remember it, on the wide first floor was the kitchen, the living room, and three bedrooms. The ceilings were higher than church, and against the back wall was a steep staircase that lead to a small bedroom and bathroom in the rafters. So my parents slept in the bed and my brother and I slept in cots by the window closest to the ocean. There was a mirror in a ship steering wheel on the wall, and I would stare at it as I fell asleep, the sound of the ocean filling the bedroom. We were that close.
Seaside Heights was the first beach I fell head over heels for. From Uncle Don’s house, all you had to do was go down the front steps, look both ways before crossing the street, then rush up the weathered stairs to the boardwalk that lead to the beach. The boardwalk itself stretched for miles, including a carnival with a roller coaster and the Himalayas (my favorite all time carnival ride), funnel cake and friendship bracelets. My older cousins would race my brother and me down the length at the boardwalk, stopping at every pay phone to jam our fingers in the coin slot and look for quarters.
The ocean was frothy, salty, constant. The beach was empty in the early morning, crowded with bright towels and circles of families in beach chairs by the afternoon, peopled with couples strolling and kids showered and fed tumbling along the sand at dusk. When I was twenty four I went to Cape Cod for the first time, and when we climbed onto the beach at Wellfleet, I looked at the dunes and the miles of emptiness and I thought, you call this a beach? Where are the people, the coolers, the umbrellas, the fried food, the beer cozies, the sweet smell of suntan lotion?
One afternoon my brother took off on his bike, and I was desperate to follow. So I picked up my bike from the sandy garage and pushed off, wobbling down a sidewalk so specific to my childhood that I can still picture the worn pebbles in the concrete, the way the asphalt was a gentler gray, washed by salt air and sun. I pushed my feet on the pedals and had gone a whole block before I realized I was riding a bike by myself. “Dad!” I shrieked. “Mom!” The excitement caused me to jump the curb and fall down, clattering under my bike. I don’t remember the fall but only the moment before it, that moment of realizing you’re doing something you thought was never going to happen for you. I skinned my knee open and was left with a scar the size of a lightning bug. It’s my favorite scar.
In the trunk of Emily’s car is a beach umbrella and a beach chair and half a pound of sand from the Rockaways. Sometimes she wants to take these things out of the trunk and store them inside, but I won’t let her. You never know when you’ll need things for the beach.
xo,
c
p.s.
* Wednesday, June 8th I’ll be reading with some fine folks to celebrate Emily Moore’s chapbook Shuffle. The theme of the reading is An Ode to Our Twenties, and I’m in awe of how she so beautifully evokes the dive bars and girls and heartbreak of being young and queer in New York in her poetry (the New Yorker agrees and has published her poetry). You can order the chapbook here and RSVP for the reading here.
* Speaking of poetry: this one appeared in my inbox last month and I love it for how it touches on summer and nostalgia but doesn’t overwhelm with either one.
* Do you like basketball? Do you like books? Did you ever think these things could co-exist? The second ever Other NBA is happening June 15th, and you will not want to miss it! It’s Writers vs. Publishers, all for a good cause.
* Ten years ago, my very first essay was published in an anthology of young queer writers. It’s just been reissued as a new edition with more queer voices, and I highly recommend it.
* Recently I learned that you can go to Magnolia Market in Texas which is a shop curated by Chip and JoJo and now I’m dying to go (don’t look at me like you’ve never watched Fixer Upper!). I mean, they even have food trucks. It’s like Pintrest IRL AND PIZZA.
* Have you met Roux, the wonder cat with just two legs? She is my favorite new follow on Instagram.
* Here I am on the wide front steps of Uncle Don’s house, with my brother, the summer I learned to ride a bike.
