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Tom Cardella is on vacation this week. This column previously ran July 12, 2001.
OK, it’s not a sea, it’s the Atlantic Ocean, to which we escape for summer fun. The stages of one’s life define “summer fun.”
If you were fortunate enough to get to the Jersey Shore when you were young, summer fun was days on the beach followed by nights on the boardwalk. When one approached drinking age (notice I wrote “approached,” not reached, because Jenna Bush did not invent the false ID to get a drink before she turned 21), summer fun became the pursuit of beer, sex and rock ’n’ roll, to be amended to include drugs by a later generation.
Parents of young children who clamor for their share of summer fun define the term by the absence of those young children, the thrill of being on a beach without having to build sand castles, and the ecstasy of seeing their kids leave for the rides with grandma and grandpop. As for grandma and grandpop, we suddenly rediscover summer fun can be defined by merely a smile on the faces of our grandchildren at the beach or on the boardwalk.
From a strictly physical viewpoint, jumping the waves or going into a crowded and noisy amusement pier should be more difficult to handle as grandparents than when we were 25 years younger. Maybe the whims and desires of young children grow more precious to us when we don’t have to deal with them 24 hours a day.
Whatever it is, the noise and the bright lights of the amusements no longer cause our stomachs to churn and our heads to ache. A smile crosses our lips as we watch our little ones riding the rides of our own youth. We make a subconscious link to when their parents — our kids — were riding the same rides as well and wearing the same excited faces. And we react as our parents reacted: We smile and wave as the kids go by on their circular journey, as if they were departing for Europe on the Queen Mary.
Although many of the rides now mirror today’s themes — a trampoline becomes a journey with Indiana Jones — it is amazing how many of them are essentially the same as the ones that gave us joy as kids and gave joy to our own kids. Only the prices have changed. The boardwalk itself is timeless.
Yes, the arcades with their sophisticated virtual-reality games are eye-popping, but the principle behind the entertainment value of each game is the same as when my cousin and I were thrilled as kids to playing “baseball” with metal figures that hit a steel ball into holes that were either outs or hits. And a big night on the boardwalk still consists of having to make that terrible choice between a slice of pizza and a cone of soft-serve ice cream. You can pick out the kids with their grandparents because they usually have both.
The timeless quality of the beach is real. Our grandkids are entranced by the same sand tunnels and castles that entranced us. A plastic shovel and a bucket are still the only items really needed to keep a kid’s interest on the beach. Some resorts have beach tags, which were unknown when we were young and still seem anti-democratic to me. The suntan lotion is measured in SPFs and smells of bananas and coconut, and there seems to be a thousand bottles to choose from. We had Gaby or maybe just some baby oil and iodine until Coppertone burst upon the scene.
But it’s hard to gimmick up the beach. The sun and sand are impervious to the encroachment of modern devices. We watch our grandkids playing and see ourselves and our own kids, and some of us sing the same silly song to them that was sung to us that begins, “By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea … ” It is the link between generations that seems, if only for a moment, to give the process of life some logical meaning.
A columnist for one of the dailies wrote if we hadn’t grown up with memories of the seashore, would we sit in the endless traffic and pay the outrageous prices to get a bit of sand on a crowded Jersey beach? And of course the answer is self-evident, even for those of us who do not regularly go to the seashore anymore. After all, you can go to the Caribbean or Florida for less money, as my wife never tires of pointing out.
But by the sea, by the beautiful sea, we search and find our past and see our future in the eyes of our grandchildren along a beautiful continuum that stretches out like the horizon on a cloudless day. Like waves that break endlessly upon the shore, our own lives seem to go on forever, and we sense for a tiny moment what eternity must be like.
And the traffic and the price of pizza and the grains of sand that found their way into our swimsuits don’t seem so bad. SPR
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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