Going back to Asbury Park April 12, 2024
We wake up to rain again.
Warmer this time than in the dregs of winter, yet not quite
as comfortable as I might like, and ache for summer rain and its relief.
It’s Friday, our usual day for a magical mystery tour, and
one that we’d like to take again to the shore, to Asbury Park, before the
season starts and it become too much of a traffic issue.
I suspect I need to get as much of the place before it
completely deteriorates into nothing, and there will no longer be a reason to
go there.
I went there a number of times with Hank back when the Stone
Pony was just another ordinary bar – and we didn’t have to spend a fortune to
catch the acts there.
It wasn’t until a later trip (in 2014) that I realized the
Pony was only a block from the beach.
We went once to Asbury in the dead of winter at some point
in the 1990s, wandering through the Casino when it still operated to some
degree, some kind of vast flea market on one side, while the other on the beach
side had been closed (since demolished) and now, the management has let the
casino rot to the degree people aren’t allowed to pass through it as it has
become too unstable and thus provides the excuse for greedy developers and
management to demolish the rest.
Whether we go there or not today, depends on the rain,
although we need to see Frank’s Deli again before it is sold off for redevelopment,
a place made famous by the fact that Bruce Springsteen routinely ate there
before (and even after) he became famous.
Asbury and its neighboring Ocean Grove have become our mid-year
retreats, enough like Cape May for us to feel joy in strolling there, yet two
hours closer to where we live near New York.
I suspect I’m condemned to mark the passing of things, not
just in places like Cape May or Asbury, but everywhere we go, as our generation
gives up the ghost to a new vision by a new generation that has no use for what
we value.
I got this same feeling back in 1985 when they closed
Bertrand’s Island at Lake Hopatcong, and came to realize that those things like
Palisades Park and Asbury Park could not survive when our generation fades – especially
not with smart phones and social media and this illusion of contemporary
entertainments less juvenile than a rollercoaster or merry-go-round.
Someone yesterday mentioned the old church fairs we used to
see as kids, which have vanished partly because they do not fit in modern childhood’s
agenda, but partly because churches are vanishing along with the religious
beliefs that sustained them – one more thing that separates what we believed,
and what people believe today.
In Asbury, luxury housing has replaced all of the
entertainments we enjoyed as kids, and to get these we will have to go further
south to Point Pleasant, Seaside or even The Wildwoods, which have become anachronisms
in their own right, and like Woodstock village up north, a bit of history that
can’t possibly survive the march of time.
Anyway, wherever we go, I’ll bring an umbrella
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