the rix mix

Labels: gin mill, jersey shore, postcard, Somers Point NJ

Labels: boardwalks, jersey shore, motel hotel, postcard, Somers Point NJ, Wildwoods NJ

Labels: boardwalks, growing up, jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, Somers Point NJ

On a whim, & because this is my  annual Ocean City / Somers Point nostalgia week, I cross-posted my idealized childhood tale, Angels at the Jersey Shore,  over at Kos, where it was featured on the Street Prophet group front page,   &  picked up 30 recommends & some very nice comments. Although I've been a frequent commenter - often at length - over the years (a decade?),  I've rarely diary'd at Street Prophets. One reason is  I have few if any  original thoughts on religious issues, particularly in connection with politics, & others  represent  my views just fine. But my personal experiences growing up, describing a   Protestant/Catholic ecumenicism developing in myself, & around me,  before & after Pope John XXIII, no longer seems so quaintly out-of-date, as the American Catholic clerical hierarchy more strongly allies with the evangelical Protestant right. It remains to be seen if the new Pope intends to clean out this nest of pedophile-enabling snakes.

An except from one of my poems was  used on the cover of the program for the all-faith (or no faith) service at this summer's Netroots Convention. I was quite pleased about that.

Labels: about writing, Somers Point NJ

Labels: boardwalks, jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, postcard, Somers Point NJ

1950 population: 2,480
1960 population: 4,504
On the mainland, across the bay from Ocean City, Somers Point is a peninsula surrounded on three sides by bay & marsh. This postcard is pretty much how I recall the town as a child in the Fifties. Outside of some motels & a honky tonk waterfront, it remained a sleepy, small town in the summer. I think my family began barging on Aunt Bella & cousin Cath in the Forties, for a week in early August. Cath, my godmother, has lived there on the same street her entire life; first in a bungalow, then moving across the street to a larger house after she got married & began having babies. In the Fifties there were cornfields on the edge of the town. & pine woods, & ferocious mosquitoes. Note the teenage girls in the lower right (click on postcard to enlarge).

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

 For many years I had a strange, not especially pleasant memory of being in my Aunt Bella's kitchen in Somers Point NJ, watching her dump a basket of fresh live crabs into a cauldron of steaming water, slamming on the lid, & the lid bouncing as the poor crabs tried to escape. Now, Aunt Bella could be a fearsome person. She was one of my grandmother's younger sisters, & I hardly understood there were matriarchal tensions in that generation of Irish-American women, often angry ones, but these tensions did not preclude their strong sisterly bonds, which were nobody else's damned business. I was a grand-nephew. Yes, I was under her protection when in her home, she would have died for me, but she was under no obligation to show it openly, as my grandmother was.  

 I occasionally mulled over this memory, picturing it, panning it like a camera. Then one day it came to me: Aunt Bella must have barely cracked 5'. I was well below the stovetop looking up at her through a cloud of steam. I was three feet tall. The water was boiling, the crabs died instantly, & the roiling water made the lid rattle.

I recall trying to explain to one of my siblings that I don't write "history," I don't  even write "autobiography." What I do is simply a combination of the personal anecdote composer John Cage wrote for his books & used in some of his compositions, & the sort of conversations poets have in diners following readings. Writers from families with   strong ties & regular social occasions like holidays have a far greater number of childhood stories, more detailed, than I have.  One of these writers, who grew up in a tight Irish-Catholic family in Pittsburgh, abandoned her blog because the memories  poured out into long, funny tales, every post became a major writing project.  You can't do a regular blog that way.

Labels: growing up, Somers Point NJ

Labels: boardwalks, jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, postcard, Somers Point NJ

Labels: boardwalks, jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, postcard, Somers Point NJ, weather

Labels: jersey shore, postcard, Somers Point NJ

Labels: gin mill, jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, postcard, Somers Point NJ

Labels: jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, postcard, Somers Point NJ

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Somers Point NJ is a peninsula surrounded by water & swamp. In 1970 it had a population of about 8,000, up 75% since 1960, fueled mostly, I suspect, by white flight from Atlantic City & Pleasantville.  Legalized gambling in A.C. pushed it up past 11,000.  Until then, it was a sleepy town 9 months of the year, woke up in the summer to provide liquor & entertainment for dry Ocean City across the bay. It still does that. My family stayed there for week every summer because we could & it was free, packing into my aunt's  bungalow (read Angels at the Jersey Shore). That accommodation became unreasonable when my aunt & her daughter & son-in-law moved across the street to a larger house, & my cousin (& godmother) Catherine had babies. So for a few years we rented an apt in Ocean City (see An Ocean City Week).  Dad, though always  employed, had four kids & did not earn a lot of money, & his ambitions were focused outside his job.

The Somers Point I recall had cornfields. Those are long gone, but certainly the ferocious swarms of twilight time mosquitoes are still there in season. 

Staying in Ocean City was a dream come true, walking to beach & boardwalk. As nuch as my parents loved the beach & boardwalk,  the week in Somers Point was their vacation, & they didn't mind spending a good part of it sitting in lawn chairs in my Aunt Bella's backyard doing nothing. Every jaunt to Ocean City was a journey, & they didn't like going twice-a-day, in the afternoon & evening.  Plus, Dad enjoyed beach strolling late afternoon with our dog, Susie. So we were trapped in Somers Point a good deal of the time, without bicycles. Having a bike would've added a whole other dimension of adventure. There simply wasn't much to do in Somers Point for a kid. You could risk poison ivy & collect punks. You could beg for ice cream money & walk up the street to the corner store.  We had many dull, idle hours waiting for a decision from above, when & if we were going across the bay,

My friend, Jeff Jotz, made a similar traditional annual trek to Seaside Park, packed uncomfortably with relatives   into his uncle's seasonal rental apartments. But once there, Jeff could get to the beach & boardwalk on his own, or drop a crab trap into the bay, provided he could find some smelly bait.

When I was 18, my girlfriend's extended family rented a house in Seaside for a week. I drove down late one evening for a visit, when we got back from the boardwalk & making out on the beach, I spread a sleeping bag on the back porch, the only vacancy, woke up about 7 am with a little boy sitting on me & about 5 other kids standing around whispering, "That's Karen's boyfriend."

Labels: boardwalks, growing up, jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, Somers Point NJ

Labels: jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, postcard, Somers Point NJ

Labels: jersey shore, postcard, Somers Point NJ

Labels: jersey shore, motel hotel, Ocean City NJ, postcard, Somers Point NJ

Labels: boardwalks, jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, postcard, Somers Point NJ

Labels: boardwalks, growing up, jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, postcard, Somers Point NJ