On the way to Ocean City we would take the boulevard from Route 9 and over a white cement bridge built with money from the flush sixties. On your way to 34th Street you will pass through and over brackish marshes. Seeing the marshes really isn’t the most apt verb. What hits you here is the smell. Brackish water just smells off. It has a taint of sulfur and a whiff of decomposition. But it is heavy with moisture and oxygen. If you are a newbie to the beach world this olfactory blast as you cross over the boulevard causeway is worrisome. You think to yourself ‘is this what the whole place is going to smell like, crap?’
The trip over the marsh lasts five or six minutes top and then you are out on the barrier island. The closer you get to the beach itself the smell of the air changes. The aroma shifts to something almost pure. While you can clearly smell the salt from the froth of the water at its edge there is something that is hard to pin down. My guess has always been is that while the sand that churns in the water and the aquatic life that lives and dies in the water add a few scents that what you really sensing is something that is missing.
In the cycle of rain into the earth into the ocean I am sure that the sea water is taking pollution and impurity from the air. On a stretch of beach away from traffic and human contamination like the smell of hot dogs and fries the air is about as pure as it gets. Cleansed and renewed. When the traffic has gone for the day at that time when people are just shuffling about at the water’s edge your lungs are getting healthy highly saline infused air both refreshing and invigorating.
During the years I spent at the water’s edge there were two other smells that stood out beyond the smell of the water. These were the smell of raisin sticky buns freshly baked and of fried seafood picked up hot and to go. The raisin cinnamon rolls meant morning was undeniably upon me and the seafood meant end of a day and the end of the weekend. Who needed a clock or calendar when you had Dot’s Pastry and Campbell’s Seafood?
Dot’s was what the old man brought back after one of his early morning walks around the beach. Dad would be sneaking out to have coffee and that first prohibited cigarette of the day. (He was told to quit and they would kill him but he just couldn’t give up the habit.) Grabbing the cigarettes from his hiding place outside the apartment when he secreted them from Mom would walk for blocks and blocks along the water’s edge. On each of these early morning walks he would have a cigarette cradled in his hand. He had a terry cloth beach jacket with oversized pockets and baggy shorts. He would walk and smoke and pick up interesting shells and rinse them off and pocket them. Shells went in one pocket the packet of Chesterfield’s went in the other. After a good long walk he would turn and head back to the house. Stopping at Dot’s he would get sticky buns.
Dot’s sticky buns were densely packed with cinnamon, raisins and covered with a hard crunch amber glaze somewhere between pure honey and pure sugar. If you walked into Dots the smell would short circuit your brain with cravings for treats. The smell of fresh baking would make you shiver and twitch. Even when the old man opened the box back at the apartment, where my Mom already had coffee on in one of those old time percolators with the glass at the top where you could watch the coffee perk, the smell of the sticky buns was strong enough to walk the dead; the dead well that was me.
Trust me I would smell the sticky buns but I would try and ignore them. I would roll and shift under the sheet and the cotton bedspread that were all that you needed on most island nights. Really I would pull the pillow over my head because I did not want to get up. But that sweet warm spiced smell of the soft gooey bread, the raisins and the crunchy crust was too hard to ignore. It was more of a motivation to get up than even having to really, really take a piss was.
Coffee did not come into my life until I was in my thirties. It didn’t move me at all as a motivator for waking.
After taking a leak pulling on my shorts and a blue t-shirt that bore the inscription “Zap” I would make my way to the refrigerator. My parents would already be on their 2nd cup of Maxwell House and I would pull out a gallon of whole white milk from the Acme Market. Reaching the table I would lean over and pull a cinnamon sticky bun off the half dozen that were there in the white rectangular box. If it were a good day the buns were still warm. This was pre-microwave and there was something really special about a warm sweet roll. Cold, cold whole milk and that roll and I knew the day was started.
On the other end of the clock was Campbell’s Seafood. It was reserved for once a week as a special dinner. Again the meal was served in a white rectangular box pretty much the same as the sticky buns came in but oh the flavor was different. Inside the seafood combination was a crab cake, a piece of flounder, fries, a scallop, a clam cake and I think a shrimp. Campbell’s was real honest to God seafood. No Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks here. The take out store was a block and a half’s walk from our apartment. My parents would sit on the porch of the apartment while I was given some money and sent to Campbell’s to place the order and wait the 10 or 15 minutes until it was done.
The place wasn’t air conditioned and it was hot, but damn did it smell good. After standing in line with other people in various degrees of beachwear you ordered, paid and were given a claim check. It really was too hot to stay inside so you walked the parking lot or grabbed a seat on the porch or just found some way to occupy your time. However the whole time you were there the smell of fresh frying seafood was hanging in that salt air. I am salivating now just remembering it.
As you leaned against the telephone pole out front you kicked some grass that was popping up out of the sidewalk. You looked at the cars zooming down Asbury faster than they had any right to go on that narrow street. Asbury was the main street and heavily travelled but if someone opened their driver’s side door when someone was passing by the door would be gone.
Each person would go in once, twice three times to see if the food was done. The college girls in their white service worker uniform would check the receipts on each stack of boxes that was twinned together and then shake their head no. But eventually after you had walked the block one last time the food would be there, they’d take your receipt and off you would go back to the apartment to eat.
Flounder freshly fried is the food of the gods. It isn’t a strongly flavored fish. But it is crunchy and there are no bones to worry about the way Campbell’s made it. With ketchup and horseradish you made up an extra batch of cocktail sauce and then you dug in. It was heaven. The fries were crisp and each piece of food tasted real. Tell me how many times in a week do you sit down to a meal in a fast food place and somewhere in the back of your head think something like, “I wish this was really barbeque or chicken or whatever”. Ice tea washed seafood down, milk was not permitted. Yeah it wasn’t just the salt air smell that made the beach a place so burned in my memory.
My sense of On Caring is that its depth is such that any attempt at approaching it is almost from the start doomed to failure. It is like a chocolate torte, no matter how much you love and savor it; it must be digested in small almost wee bits. Sitting down at the table with a “mission” to devour the torte in a single sitting will waste it and wreck havoc on the entrails of anyone attempting it. Sometimes you grab a bite here and there in a non sequential place but it is still so very rich. I am reading this cover to cover right now but maybe that doesn’t work for you. Feel free to nibble in the dark when you’re hungry.
In section five the author points out that caring is never routine, never rote and never accomplished by “sheer habit”. I act in furtherance of caring, that is helping the other to grow, and then I monitor what has happened and reset in response to the results. If I know the other and myself as I should I will be able to decide whether action or watchful inaction is the best course. Sometimes I will be wrong.
Sometimes when I am deciding what is actually an act of caring I will have to balance the big and little pictures. Is what I am seeing and experiencing from the other something transient that is best ignored or is it part of something deeper that needs to be addressed? Having the ability, experience and knowledge to decide if an act must be viewed in isolation or as part of a larger fabric and to react aptly requires being in tune with the rhythms of a caring relationship.
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