In today's Philadelphia Inquirer: remembering the Jersey Shore

This past Monday, my son and I traveled to the Jersey Shore—Stone Harbor—to see my brother, his wife, and their two children.  They've been renting a place there for a long time now, and barring unforeseen circumstances, I join them for a day each year.  I took some photographs on Monday for an essay Avery Rome had invited me to write, and today I'm privileged to have the piece appear here, in the Currents section of the Philadelphia Inquirer.



I share the first paragraph of my remembrances of, and nostalgia for, Stone Harbor, below.  But before I do, I'd like to share this—a photograph of my brother and sister, sand sculpture-ers supreme, taken years ago. 

In the same way that I believed in black raspberry ice
cream, blue-fingered crab, and the pink sheen of a flipped shell, I believed,
as a kid, in the Jersey Shore, specifically Stone Harbor.  It possessed me and I possessed it
those two weeks of every year when our parents would pack the caroming car with suits, rafts, shovels, pails, rusty-bottomed beach chairs, crab
traps, tangled reels, and (where there was still room) my brother, my sister,
and me.