New Jersey

New Jersey

• My family owned a home on Long Island Island on the bay from 1974 to 2005.
• I spent my college summers, working at the beach.  I worked at Hartman's Amusement Park, The Bay Village Bakery, The Mooring Restaurant and Howard's Restaurant.
• I loved, loved, loved watching the sunsets over the bay.
• I loved the sounds of the gulls in the morning.
• I never went to the beach until late afternoon as the sun was just too intense for my Irish, pale white skin.
• My father's brothers also had homes on Long Beach Island so we got together frequently.
• I got spew away on a rip tide and had to be pulled in by three life guards.
• Howard's Restaurant sold french fried lobster and it was so fucking good.
• My cousin owns the Coral Seas Hotel and sometimes, in late October, after the season is over, he opens it up just to us and we all spend the weekend there.
• Two friend come in from Germany most years and they always want to go to this island for at least a day.
• There is an oyster house on the island and the Germans and I go there during happy hour and run up a $100+ bill just on raw oysters and the oysters are only $1/each.  We eat like pigs. 
• Traffic on this island during the summer is dreadful.  Off season, it's a piece of cake.
• The last summer my mother was alive, I invited all of my siblings to come join us.  She had cancer and we all knew the end was looming over us. They all showed up.  It was so joyful.   At 5PM, my mother turned to me and said, "I cant believe I am having 17 people for dinner and I don't give a shit." At night, everyone just grabbed a corner of the house and just slept there. That was the last time we were all together in that house.  After she died, my siblings didn't like to go back to that house. It quickly became a very sad, heavy house.
• After my mother died, my father and I continued to go there during the summer weekends. But my siblings rarely came anymore.
• My dad died seven years later.  We put the house on the market and it sold in three days.
• For several years after that, I didn't like to come to the island.