“Summer down the shore is better, richer. It's a way
to measure progress, to recount the year's failings, to reconnect with last
season’s friends and flings. The beach’s changes underscore our own. Another
year gone. It’s the transience that matters, the brevity that bonds
beachgoers.” —Pat Cunnane, television writer and former Obama White House
senior writer, “Goodbye to Summer, Just As It Begins,” The Wall Street Journal, July 7-8, 2018
I no longer go down to the shore the way I once did,
but the memories stick with me from my long-ago youth. Cunnane is right—it is
that “transience”—not just of nature, but of one’s life—that creates the bond
that we remember always. That’s why, when Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen sing,
“Down by the shore, where everything’s all right,” we New Jerseyans know
exactly what they mean.
(The attached photo of sunrise on the New Jersey Shore,
with a seagull, was taken Aug. 15, 2009, by John Robinette.)
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