Wednesday, 21 April 2004 | Wrong with the Jersey shore

Somehow I convinced Martin to take the train with me to the Jersey shore for the day on Friday, despite the fact that it was his birthday. Not that there's anything wrong with the Jersey shore, but it meant hanging out with my mom and my grandparents for a few hours. Not that there's anything wrong with my mom and my grandparents, but hanging out with someone else's mother and grandparents is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when considering how to spend your 29th birthday.

The journey from my apartment to Belmar (via Penn Station) took three hours, even though the two are techinically only 40 miles apart (over the river ocean and through the woods). Through the train's big windows, I was reminded that there are large swaths of space that are inhabited only by wildlife and insects and foliage and water, and that the horizon doesn't naturally start hundreds of feet in the air. I wish I left the city more often, because that's a bad thing to forget.

Mom was standing on the platform next to her brother when we arrived. Her face had been replaced with a digital video camera; she smiled and waved from beneath it. My uncle stood there quietly with his hands hidden in his pockets, looking a little like Abraham Lincoln, like he's apt to do.

Mom cooked flounder while I poked around, looking at the items in my grandparents' house that never change. Remembering them doesn't take any effort. For example, in the den, there's a clear house-shaped 3-dimensional frame with pictures of my grandfather and his now-deceased hunting dogs, two paint-by-number dog paintings that my mom made when she was in high school, and, well, more frames, full of kids who haven't been kids in years. No items change places, none of the people in the images age, and nothing gets dusty.

I wandered outside and accidentally met the next door neighbor. I met the neighbors across the street, too, the ones who have a trampoline in their yard, but that was on purpose. The man who gave me permission to jump called his two boys over to watch me do flips. I could still do the gymnastics, but I felt like I was made of lead, and I was panting after only a minute. My bad arm suffered through stubborn back-handsprings, and my entire body was sore for days afterward. It made me wish that I could preserve my younger body the way my grandparents perserve their den.

In the afternoon, Mom, Martin and I walked on the boardwalk and the beach, which is only about a mile from my grandparents'. We convinced my mom to drive us the 10 miles to Asbury Park, so we could see the ghost of an amusement park, which was little more than lots of chipped paint, rusted signs, and caving in buildings. Apparently I'd visited the actual amusement park, when I was three, just before its final decline. I can only recall a single still image of park rides, from the perspective of the beach. Er, the shore.

Both before and since the trip, Martin and I each have slipped up and called our destination "the New Jersey coast," "the New Jersey beach," and so on, and every time, each of us is corrected with a slowly shaking head or a wag of a finger. "You mean shore," we've been chided. However, none of the critics we've encountered can tell us why "shore" is the only acceptable term. Does anyone know?