Superstorm Sandy

Kind of Organizing My Thoughts

I’m not sure what to say.  Right now, I’ve just got tons of stuff rolling around in my head; so this may end up a bit of a ramble.  Above all, I’m thankful.  CoolMom, CoolDaughters 1& 2, and I are all fine.  CoolDad Music HQ came through relatively unscathed.  We are still waiting for the power to come back, but power is really all we’ve lost.  My parents and our always caring and always reliable friends Dina, Doyle, and Maisie have been putting up with us throughout the power outage.  And MomVee and her family made a generous offer of warmth and food.  We’re incredibly lucky.

Others, obviously, were not so lucky.  Just a block from our house, neighbors have piled furniture destroyed by the Shrewsbury River onto the side of the street.  In the town across the bridge from us, it’s the same only worse.  Seaside towns like Sea Bright are facing months, if not years, of work to recover; and they will never be the same.

I guess saying that I haven’t lost anything but power isn’t entirely true.  After my family moved to New Jersey from Brooklyn in 1975, the beach – and especially the town of Sea Bright – became a huge part of my life.  In the summers, my mother carted my brother and me, along with a cooler full of bologna sandwiches and Shasta, to Edgewater Beach Club in Sea Bright every day.  From about 9 in the morning until about 3 in the afternoon we baked in the sun and swam in the ocean.  Our day was made if we could coax my mother to give us a dollar so that we could buy french fries or a chocolate chip mint ice cream cone at the snack bar.  When I got too old to hang out with the younger kids, I fished off the jetty.

During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, my friend Danny – whom I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – and I would ride to Sea Bright.  I would freeload off of his family’s membership at Ship Ahoy.  A certain female classmate worked at the snack bar there, so my fifteen year-old self stuttered and stammered through more than a few burger orders.  Like lots of friends, Danny and I grew apart, then back together, then apart again; but I will always remember that summer, with its afternoon bike races back home, as a particularly good one.

It wasn’t only Sea Bright, though.  Throughout high school, I earned money cooking food at the snack bar of Sea Girt’s public beach.  Cheese fries and pork roll, egg, and cheese.  My friends and I would spend summer evenings with a cooler on West End beach in Long Branch.  I could never get the sand from that beach out of my silver Tercel.  Today, I still do my runs along the promenade in Long Branch whenever I can.  The first words I ever wrote on this blog were, "I love Asbury Park."

I’m not yet sure how all of those towns did in the storm, but I know that the Jersey Shore that I remember isn’t coming back.

Beach clubs.  Sea Girt, summer home of Bill Parcells.  Parts of the Jersey Shore are more than pretty well off, it’s true.  I’ve seen and heard comments from people indicating that this somehow means that the people affected by Sandy are less deserving of help.  Sandy covered a thousand miles and affected thirteen states.  Along with affluent communities like Sea Girt and Mantoloking, Sandy hit working-class areas like Long Branch, Asbury Park, and the Bayshore.  In New York, Rockaway and Staten Island have been devastated.  Some of the people who lost everything may have the resources to get back on their feet eventually.  Others, most certainly, do not.  Either way, they are your neighbors; and until they get things together, they will need help.

Again, we’re all fine here and I’m more than thankful.  I haven’t lost nearly as much as the people of Seaside Heights or Breezy Point or Hoboken or even Oceanport, so I’ll give what I can to relief efforts.  But anyone who grew up here or spent their summers here definitely lost a little piece of themselves.