the rix mix

A year arrived when Dad & Mom rented a large apartment on Wesley Ave. in Ocean City for a week. This was a fabulous turn of events for me. We'd always stayed in Somers Point, totally dependent on the car & Dad's timetable to get us to & from the beach & boardwalk. But my cousin was married & she & her husband were filling their house with babies, our noisy annual visits had become too great a hassle for them. Now I would go to bed in Ocean City & wake up in Ocean City. The apartment was in an old victorian type like this one, with a high front porch. it's probably a B&B now. While everyone was jockeying for their rooms I grabbed the little one nobody wanted - behind the kitchen & next to a back door opening on a delivery alleyway that cut through the middle of the block. I discovered a network of these back alleys in OC. My room had been a walk in pantry or cook's bedroom.

I'd also discovered inner tubes in a pile of huge discarded truck tires next to a repair shop in Roselle Park. Patched & fully inflated, the tube was as tall as me, a massive black donut. I'd tested it out in our circular backyard pool, learned to stand up on it & dive off. The only problem was a long L shaped valve protruding from the center, but if it was pointed down you minimized any chance of getting a painful scratch. I couldn't wait to try it out on ocean waves. When I first rolled my giant tube out of the alley & down the street to the beach, I could tell Ocean City had never seen anything like it. Fortunately, neither had the Ocean City lifeguards, who generally took a lenient attitude toward flotation devices anyway & were too amused to question me about its safety & reliability. The tube performed royally on the long, high swells that came across Ocean City's sand bars, & even large breakers tended to bounce it toward the shore rather than flipping it. & just as in the pool, with a little practice I discovered I could stand up on it & keep standing, riding up & down as waves passed underneath. Rich kids watched me with envy. & it hadn't cost me a cent. My giant tube was so ahead of its time - nobody was floating down the Delaware in them yet - evincing such "Incredible, why didn't I think of it?" reactions from others that it may well have been the pinnacle of my childhood. Since I already stuttered & had won free games of miniature golf on the 18th hole despite terrible scores, there was nothing left to do but wait for puberty.

It rained a couple of times that week, I recall some card-playing & boredom. Ocean City was a safe place; although I was only 10 I was pretty much allowed to go my own way as long as I met up with the family on the beach & returned for supper. Mine wasn't a togetherness kind of family. My sister was into boy-watching, one of my brothers was addicted to skeeball, the oldest tended to just disappear, showing up later with something weird from a novelty store. Ocean City wasn't known for big rides & fancy amusements. There was enticing food everywhere, & what seemed like two dozen candy shops, brightly lit sugar emporiums, inside were smiling teenage girls wearing white blouses & striped aprons, standing behind long glass display cases packed with trays of goodies, inducing a week-long Pavlovian drool & a craving for chocolate variations almost mystical in intensity. But an ice cream cone was all I could expect from my parents. I did enjoy tagging along on their leisurely nightly boardwalk strolls through the shops with classy fronts but packed with the same old dusty kitsch souvenir merchandise inside - yet endlessly fascinating to a kid; hearing corny band music leaking from the Music Pier; stopping to watch a stainless steel salt water taffy machine twisting the gooey stuff at one end & popping out little perfectly wrapped candies at the other. That week was first time I really explored a Jersey boardwalk, finding the nooks, crannies, hiding places & shortcuts. But it was just a warm-up. By the following summer my grandmother had retired, moved out of our house & into a great apartment one block from the Atlantic City boardwalk.

Labels: growing up, jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, postcard