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orien was speaking recently in their journal about how one can smell the sea here, and how they were unused to that.It's a funny thing, Manhattan being so small an island, but really, rarely can you smell the sea here. Mostly only on days like this, when there are massive storms far far down the coast. I don't really know why that is, it's not something I really know anything about.
While summer is far from my favourite season, I am sad to see it go. I got to the beach merely once this summer, mainly because of poor weather, work, and rehearsals. I'm hardly a beach rat, and go entire summers without going at all, but that's a strange thing, because I like it so much.
I am beyond wary to swim in the ocean. It unnerves me. And if I walk about in it up to my waist that's as impressive as it's likely to get. Sometimes this disappoints me about myself, but often not. If there's anything to be afraid of in this life, the sea seems a terribly reasonable choice -- more so than dogs, horses, a variety of insects or heights, certainly.
I am very very fond of it though. My grandmother lived in Bradley Beach, NJ and we spent a great deal of time there as a child. I liked the beach not for swimming or sand or warmth, but for the wind that seemed ever present, and as a child I pretended it was there only for me, and that I could control it. Even now, when we do get nights like these here, with random sea-smelling gusts, it feels like a secret personal blessing. I love the wind, more than anything, even as I was in terror at the way it howled against our apartment windows when I was little, and resent it when it blows so directly in my face it's as if I cannot breathe. When I learned that Libra is not just air, but violent air, I was so amused. I miss my long hair only because it made me so fierce in that wind.
Of course, not being overly keen on going in the ocean, I really could still go to the beach anyway, just to be near all that, but it's a strange thing, and the last time I did that, it was with Michael and a friend, and it was an unpleasant affair, redeemed for me only by the fact that we were in Montauk, which also was a locale of my childhood, and there were storms, and it was like the end of the world at this stupid yacht club. After we stopped talking, Michael wrote me a check for his share of the trip. I hadn't expected it. It seemed kind, in a perfunctory sort of way, which says everything it needs to.
Bradley Beach, for those who don't know, is by Asbury Park, which most people have heard of courtesy of Bruce Springsteen and the Stone Pony I guess. But for me, it will always be a place of concrete animals and weird, dying amusement park attractions. It shows up in the news ever so many years, when something else gets ripped down, or someone else promises to come in and fix it up. It was sad twenty-five years ago when I was a little kid, and it's still sad now.
But it smells like the sea, and always seemed a part of a different world, maybe because of the exit to get there, surrounded by all the burnt up trees or maybe because of the smell of my grandmother's house -- oily pasta marinara, packaged apple cookies, and the fig tree in the back yard surrounded by independently minded mushrooms. My mother would help her in the kitchen, eventhough my mother is Jewish and it was a family bone of contention, and each would ask me who was the better cook of Italian food (truthfully, I can say this now, my Jewish mom). The carpet in the living room was orange, and the TV had a remote control with a wire.
Outside, there were children who lived there year round, and rode bikes and could do anything in the water at all. I was encouraged to play with them, but it never made sense to me, as I was just a visitor, and they living just a block from the ocean never noticed that the sea smelled a certain way at all.
On the trip back home, in my father's '74 Chevy (and later in rental cars) we called the grey bomb, we'd always stop at Criterion Candy, which had a shop on the Asbury Park boardwalk back then. Mom could get her peppermint patties, and my father and I could get the coconut ones. My mother hates coconut (not that it would stop her from peeling the chocolate off them once she'd eaten all of her candy), and it was one more subject on which she could complain about my similarity to my father. My father would have one bite of the candy, complain his teeth hurt from it and that it was too sweet and look at me sternly after that.
In the winters, my grandmother stayed at her apartment in Florida, in the complex where my parents met, and would send us cases of oranges from some service that always included a random box of coconut patties from some other company. They were my favourite thing to come to us in the dark of winter, always unexpectedly, even if my mother made me eat the grapefruits (which I loathed) when I was sick. And even in the refrigerator, I always thought that little box of candy smelled like the sea.
