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Labor Day has come and gone for another year. College football is already here as the campuses across the nation spring back to life. Parents hustle their kids off to school. (Is it my imagination or do the parents get younger every year?) The Jersey Shore has been transformed into sleepy backwater towns again and it’s where you’ll find Uncle Nunzio.
Uncle doesn’t wish tourists any ill will. He realizes without them his town of Wildwood, N.J., might disappear in the economic gloom. But as they vanish for another year, Uncle springs to life. His nephew once likened Wildwood to the mythical place of Brigadoon, a spot that comes to life just once every 100 years and then falls back asleep. Well, his nephew might think Wildwood slumbers after Labor Day, but what the hell does he know?
Time moves at a slower pace following Labor Day down the Shore. It moves at Uncle Nunzi’s pace. The weather is still gorgeous. The air has a slight crispness to it like the snap of a good apple. The ocean water is warm. As long as the hurricanes stay offshore, September is a good time to be alive at the Shore.
His ritual is much the same as when his wife was alive. When he gets lonely, he still talks to her and imagines her visiting him with every butterfly he sees. He eats peas right out of the can. (Who says peas have to be heated?) While the rest of the world likes its corn on the cob tender, Uncle likes it tough, what he calls "horse corn." He no longer can devour 20 ears at a time, but he can still eat his fair share without experiencing any stomach discomfort. At least that part of his anatomy has aged well.
He still makes his own wine and cures his own soppressata. Some might find his wine a little too strong or a bit bitter, but Uncle finds adding a few slices of a fresh peach takes care of any problem. After Labor Day, he likes to sit on his front porch, drink some from a water tumbler and chew on some soppressata. Life is good and he doesn’t plan on leaving any time soon.
After Aunt Millie died, he sold his old Shore home to someone who tore it down and put up motel units. He passed by one day and saw cars parked where he used to have his fig tree and tomato garden. He never passed by again. With the money he made from the sale, he purchased a much smaller place where no longer had to rent apartments for revenue. The one thing he made sure of beforehand was that it had a porch and space out back for a small garden.
He no longer purchased vegetables by the bushel because he didn’t have Aunt Millie to help him cook and preserve them in Mason jars. He still stopped by the roadside stands, but there were fewer where he knew the owners and he bought by the bag instead of the bushel. He could live off wine, corn and chunks of soppressata for weeks at a time. He hardly ever ate out. He never understood the attraction of paying for a meal at a restaurant when you had food in your own refrigerator. Once in a great while, he would buy a couple slices of pizza for a treat or would go to the Ravioli House. Even the Ravioli House became off limits when the lines started forming outside. That was another thing Uncle didn’t understand: Why would anyone stand in line to pay for dinner?
He tried to ignore some of the changes in Wildwood that have come about in recent years (according to Uncle’s sense of time, everything that happened had happened "recently"). He didn’t like all the condos that surrounded him and cut off the cool ocean breeze. He didn’t understand how anyone could live in a building with elevators and no place to plant a fig tree or grow tomatoes. In time, he had learned to ignore them. "Live and let live" was his motto, or as Aunt Millie used to say, "to each his own."
His favorite pastime in what he called "the off-season" was to walk the beach along the water’s edge. The blaring radios were gone, along with the tourists and their kids. The beach was quiet except for the crashing waves. Uncle could still walk a long way without the benefit of an iPod, just lost in his own thoughts. His skinny legs still had life in them. He usually wore an old baseball cap, although he had no time for baseball, just a need to protect his balding head from the sun. Dressed in an old pair of shorts Aunt Millie had once purchased for him at Silens, his bare legs and feet were stained walnut brown.
There was a drawback to being old when September rolled around at the Shore. He no longer felt that air of expectancy the young tourists felt as they rushed back to their lives in the nearby cities and towns. But he consoled himself with his own sense of renewal that here it was another September and he was still alive and well. And didn’t the ocean look beautiful today?
