It is hot and humid and I do not like air conditioning. Something about sleeping in airconditioning in 2002 and waking up with a blood clot in the leg -
that took a fewdays to recognize,seek treatment and end up in a hospital. Ended up in a room with a Dementia and or Alzheimer's patient. An old guy who was in WWII and knew French and was an interpreter for the brass in Paris etc.
I am getting old now and wonder if that is where I end up. Trapped in a body with long term memories and terrorized by not knowing where I am here and now or who everybody is no matter who they say they are or claim to be in relation to me? And repeating at random those old memories to strangers or captive audiences in the next bed. Or pulling all the things off and out of your arms and the next person in the next bed is paging the nurses to redo all the things inserted into one's body. And the staff wanting to put you in the hallway to better monitor you and you yelling discrimination and anti-Semitism and your roommate saying that "he" is not a burden to have in the same room and maybe even glad to be thinking of other things rather than one's own mortality or reaching 50 in a few months and remembering Marshall who died when he was 49 and you liked him, that stranger, better than your own brother. And thinking sometimes too much how much life is unfair. And remembering that guy's favorite sarcastic line - "life sucks and then you die".
That whole nine or ten months leading off of the 911 attacks downtown left a lot of the population shell shocked and walking around in a daze and many more like myself no doubt suffering a form of PTSD that raised paranoid and blood pressure levels to cause health issues such as blood clots in myself. That after the attacks I did less traveling or shopping in leisure time and thus w/ less exercise and more unhealthy.
Well getting back to the weather, I had wanted then to look at old photos, from the family photo album (sounds so old fashioned and obsolete?) of a childhood trip to Brigantine New Jersey. I still would have liked to have seen them now.
A friend of mine on FB from childhood who is more of a friend now than back when in the old neighborhood had once mentioned how he had recently found a bunch of old family pictures in the trash of a neighbor who died of old age. That their kids were cleaning out the house to sell it. That the photos did not matter to them so much as the money from the sale of the house. I lamented that there might be so much history in those photos. He more or less shrugged, no symbol for shrug on FB, and commented that that happens all the time these days. Whatever.
My father was cheap and or he did not make a lot of bread working in a steel mill. So when they closed the plant down every year in July or August for two weeks to retool and fix the steel furnaces etc, the inmate wage slaves had to amuse themselves.
The normal family I think went to Atlantic City or Wildwood, rented rooms at a motel with a pool and went to the beach in the day and walked the boardwalks at night for shits and giggles. No cable TV and the local Jersey broadcasting stations were either in Trenton or Philly itself, our family home base, but the Philly TV reception had a lot of snow and poor reception and the Trenton station seemed to be more orientated to Central Jersey and New York based Northern Jersey news stuff. It all seemed off a bit, not quite normal comfort zone in the living room quality stuff to me. You saw this TV programming stuff in the lobbies of motels with their wide glass paneled windows around the check in desk etc. and old dark ancient lobbies of old decrepit buildings called hotels and built likely in the 1890s or so up to the 1920s. The fabric of Atlantic City was definitely frayed around the edges. Wildwood was more likely post war and motel modern. And A.C. witnessed by those walking eight to ten blocks from free or cheap metered parking, crowded spaces at night, on the way into the nightly boardwalks excursion in Wildwood or Atlantic City from the outlying boonies where we were renting rooms.
In any case there were no TVs in the cheap rooms we rented in Brigantine once or at least twice in memory. There was radio.
Not quite rooms. More like tar paper covered shacks. But it probably was covered by those horrible asphalt impregnated shingles, with some asbestos mixed in, of brown shaped bricks that covered houses in Philly in the 20s and 30s when modern fashion could make it possible not paint old out of date Victorian structures and cover them with glamorous new cutting edge Jazz Age technology.
The shacks were on the beach on stilts and there were like 4 or five of them clustered at the street end of a pier. No air conditioning on the beach. Very breezy through screened windows and the crash of waves on the wooden supports underneath at high tide at night.
The shacks had a common room with a couch, a few wooden chairs, a table, a stove and an old fridge. That and three bedrooms and a bathroom. No doubt our crowd of four kids and two parents was a small weekend party of sorts to occupy the premises. But dad was a tight manager of money. That even in a back water then of Brigantine, the weekend rent on the shack would have been very high. Dad would drive us down on Monday, find a place for a two to three day vacation in off mid week slotted space before the weekend crowd would drift in around Wednesday afternoon. We were there to pick up on the weekend gap from those leaving on Monday morning after a weekend at the shore.
My father did not operate on using a phone to call ahead and make reservations. He was old fashioned and used sight to look for vacancy signs on affordable looking accommodations. Affordable meaning owners on the premises and the property a bit past its prime and or in need of a coat of fresh paint.
The floors were old worn out linoleum throughout. Sand everywhere constantly trekked in from the beach and to forever be swept back out with a broom. My mother used the opportunity of these trips to buy new linens for double beds at McCrory's that would be used on the vacation and transported back home after the trip.
The smell of coffee brewing on the stove in a percolator is something I will always remember as the breakfast bacon sizzled over the very distinctive smell of butane bottled gas supplying the stove flames and against the framework of fresh ocean air and the crash of distant waves, the tide having gone out a ways on the beach below.
We would hang out on the beach during the day, getting sun burned even with Coppertone as a sun screen and its greasy industrial smell and almost the only product on the market that I knew about. We had an old Coleman aluminum ice chest full of ice and cans of soda and probably no cans of beer. No alcohol on the beach. People from Pennsylvania had an adherence to rule books mentality, nature of the beast in the original German settlers along with the Quakers from the beginning of that state.
Accoutrements for kids would have been at least one new sand bucket with small shovel in bright colors and shiny interior, bucket being made of metal in those days and not plastic. This bought at McCrory's while mom was selecting the vacation bed sheets.
Near the pier the shade underneath had other smells, more distinct than those in direct sunlight, of decaying sea materials and seaweed still clinging to splinters in the wood pilings from the previous night's high ocean tide.
The main activities of the day would be collecting sea shells, wading into the ocean a few times and building sand castles.
That there is on the Internet some photos of Fedullo's Pier at 44th Street. When I have mentioned this pier to others or on the Internet a younger generation will assume the pier is one that in later times than the 1950s or 60s that got repurposed as a Haunted House at Halloween kind of business deal but that pier I believe used to be somewhere around 27th Street on the island. Brigantine was quite undeveloped back when. Now looking at Google satellite images as an island it is bursting, crowded with summer townhouses and condos with no fishing piers left as I can see.
Down the old, what seemed like a rotting wood pier, jutting maybe 500 feet into the ocean there was a single story structure of maybe a thousand square feet that housed a restaurant of sorts and a display case full of cigars boxes and souvenirs and boxes of salt water taffy. The restaurant per say had maybe four or five tables covered in red and white checked and laminated table clothes. And beyond this structure was another fifty or so feet of pier that near may have had the best fishing and maybe they charged a fee to fish there or maybe they just were near cold bottles of beer in the restaurant. The one time we went in there at sunset, no doubt for dad to buy some Lucky Strikes, there was an fat middle aged man there wearing suspenders and sweating as he ate over pile of spaghetti and meatballs in the did light of that place from a dew light bulbs.
There was no charge for us to make a look around the back pier during the day. While I probably saw some fish caught, my memory only sees one fisherman taking a baby shark about 10 inches long off a hook, banging its head on the top of the wooden railing and throwing it back into the water. Shark prejudice before Jaws.
On those short 3 days to Brigantine, once we got settled in, there would be at least one afternoon trip to Atlantic City. Over the bridge and other byways, we would end up walking up and down the Boardwalk blending in with the crowds walking by ancient hotels in graceful and not so graceful decay along side stores and storefronts selling everything touristy, tee shirts, ashtrays. Galleries of chance, darts thrown at balloons or wooden rings tossed over metal milk bottles, all to win and claim a cheap stuffed animal as a prize. A lot of barkers selling steak knives or the latest plastic kitchen aid gizmos. Most of the show was the talk and bravado of the barker who sometimes I had once read in a Philly paper were in one example a teacher, who on his summer vacation, made as much in 3 months in commissions selling their junk as they make in 9 months as civil servants in schools.
There were the boardwalk amusements not much bigger in scope than the local state fair's rides and Ferris wheel etc. With a limited budget we got on at least of two of the cheaper rides. Went into Planters past the guy wearing the big paper mache Mr. Peanut costume.
Steel Pier was off limits because of the budget. Never got to see the lady on a horse jump into a tank of water, an item that seemed to the most advertising on billboards on the highway to Atlantic City.
There was also a night trip to A.C. That seemed more exciting. No sun and chilly. Needed a jacket or sweater to walk along the boardwalk then. Lots of smells of the concessions stands full of peanuts, popcorn, hot dogs and cotton candy. Cotton candy for some reason was not something we were allowed to buy. Only got to try that years later as an adult and was disappointed btw. Sometimes parents do know what is best for you. lol
The bid thing at night at home was playing kids card games of fish or old maid and dealing with the pain of sunburn and the b.s. the parents talking up how cool Noxzema was on sunburn. Sure it went on cold feeling but then the burn came back.
That two or three days at the boonies of Brigantine were enough for a lower middle class family from the city. The only thing missing is a photo of it all.
We did have a hand me down baby brownie from our aunt, my fathers sister and it only seemed to use black and white film. It had not flash, so all the family photos from that period were outdoors. The one photo in my mind is a photo of us kids, all sunburned and half smiling through the pain, with mom at the front, near the street, with the end of the pier and restaurant structure in the shot of Fedulla's pier. A lot of history and detail in that photo minus dad who was taking the shot. A photo I thought that would be great to post on the Internet.
But it, the family photos, went west with mom after dad died and she and the other siblings seemed to have some wanderlust attraction to the sunbelt in New Mexico and Arizona and I would not go to anyplace that did not have a subway or proven reliable public transportation.
So the urge to find one photo and some other photos crept into this old man's need to reconcile with the past, to affirm a place in that past, and a need to reflect on that past etc.
But those photos seemed to elude me.
Which reminds me of my older sister's holy communion, it being celebrated at an uncle's house, her other female cousin the same age also celebrating her holy communion at some neighboring parish. And I remember being in the living room at night on a couch sitting on my grandfather's lap, my mother's father, my namesake grandfather and going blind as an older cousin had like several spotlights in my face and they played with some new toy bought on credit at some fancy department store, where out aunt, and cousin's mom worked at downtown. That I remember seeing those horrible without sound silent home movies at some later date in that uncle's house after which the house was torn down to make way for progress and I-95 and after our female cousin at died at age ten of leukemia.
I asked my aunt at a funeral years later and her son, my cousin who was giving me a car lift at that funeral between the church and the cemetery if those home movies were still around and viewable and maybe even convertible to video tape, in fashion at that moment, and all I got was a shrug. Nobody could seem to remember or maybe a lot of it all got chucked when the city condemned the house and my aunt and uncle moved over to Jersey.
Whatever again.
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