Of Beach and Books VII-Kurly Kustard and Honesty

Dear Reader,

Please be aware that I am not slacking off in pursuing my guide to Milton Mayeroff’s On Caring. What is actually occurring is that I am working on this piece in a roundabout way. I have had to go back and listen to the music of the era to put my mind in the right place spiritually to conduct my ramblings. You might want to listen to these tunes first to get you in the mood of the time. Open a second window in the background and let ‘em play while you read on.







Over three months between June and Labor Day 1974 in a physical space that was at most 20 foot by 15 foot my world was changed, rearranged and reoriented. Four people occupied that space for those three months, Nan, Larry, Andy and me. We were the Kurly Kustard crew. Larry and Nan would shape my world for years to come. I didn’t know that in June of that year, but foreknowledge wouldn’t have changed the facts.

Before Labor Day came I would fall in love helplessly and hopelessly with Nan. On the other hand Larry would show me that the world was broader than I ever thought it could be. He would teach me that decency and personal integrity count, I admit now that these were lessons I learned only when the biggest part of our friendship was in the rear-view mirror.

In addition to our four bodies the Kurly Kustard operation also contained a soda fountain, an ice cream novelties cooler, a pretzel oven, a double sided soft serve machine and a slush puppy dispenser. There was a cash register too. If the electricity went out you could operate that puppy with a crank and on occasion I did.

The store façade was about three foot high on the board walk side but on the inside it was just two foot high with a raised floor behind the aluminum counter. As a result of this differential we were always looking down at our customers and bending over to serve them their desert treats. From 10:30 a.m. to about 11 p.m. or midnight we purveyed sweets, ice cream, pretzels, soda and other refreshing eats slightly stooped over. When you walked the back door and walked down the wooden steps to the beach level your feet hurt from the concrete floor and you back ached from being bent over all night long. Just stretching at midnight after a full shift outback and in the misty ocean air was a release.

Kurly Kustard did not have air conditioning. Although we were only a couple of hundred yards from the Atlantic the pretzel oven corner of the store would get up to 110 F for hours on end. When it was a busy night each time a row or two or three pretzels would drop out the machine they would sell. On those kinds of nights the person working pretzels lived in their own little replica of hell. Over the course of the night despite drinking endless soda from our personal cups, Heroin, Morphine, Marijuana and Cocaine (novelty items the boss was never able to see in his beach sundries store located next door) you lost pounds. By 10:30 p.m. your clothes were drenched in sweat. You prayed for a breeze to wend its way around the whirring custard machines, the containers of sprinkles and bubbling fudge dip and the oven itself. Cool air rarely got that far. If the heat got too much you walked into walk in cooler and literally chilled. You stayed there until you refreshed enough to get back in the mix.

To break the monotony of the machine noise, that omnipresent electrical metal rumble and hum, we had a cassette player to play tunes. It was not a Dolby noise reducing cassette player. It was what was scrounged up. My guess was that it came from Radio Shack, it was Larry’s. It had one speaker. The noise coming through that cone roughly approximated the sound from an A.M. radio played through the front speaker of a 1963 Ford Falcon. In 1974 we were so used to this sonic quality. We chipped in and book two tapes from the really overpriced record store on the main drag through town. (Hey it was the beach, EVERYTHING was overpriced).

Two of the three tapes we shared were by David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory. These were the ones we bought. He was what was hot and on the only radio station that mattered, WMMR. Our summer’s soundtrack was provided by David Bowie and another tape was an odd mixture of Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits II thrown together by Larry. It shouldn’t have fit it, but it did. The tapes played nonstop. The tape got worn, the tape stretched. The music warbled as we played ‘em at maximum volume through that Radio Shack tape machine. The slow distortion and destruction of the tunes didn’t really matter we knew all the words to every song. Our loud singing covered any defect in the source material with our own partially semi defective singing. Some favorites emerged. First and foremost was….

Life on Mars

It's a god-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling "No"
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she's hooked to the silver screen
But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause she's lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on

Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

Bowie was sui generis. Nobody and I mean nobody was like him at the time. The rock press was filled with speculation on his sexuality, bi-, gay or straight? We searched the lyrics for meanings overt and implicit. But that voice was so beyond what anyone else sounded like right at that moment. For my mind only Marc Boylan of T.Rex was pushing the same boundaries.

With a vocal styling that was camp, dead on and nihilistic all at once, Bowie enthralled us. His voice was so perfect for 1974 as we waited for Richard Nixon to resign. Like Bowie wrote in a song he handed off the Mott the Hoople we were all bored with that revolution stuff by then. We all just wanted to smoke pot and fuck. Nothing else, our hormones were so out of control it is amazing our button fly jeans didn’t just burst with a staccato ricocheting of their metal fasteners.

Kurly Kustard’s crew was an interesting mix. Larry was a co-op student at Drexel working in physics and hard theoretical science. I have hung out with physicists over the years and the joke was that they all wear oversized shoes so as not to fall through the fabric of the universe. I mean they know nothing is solid. But Larry wasn’t like that he was a down to earth guy. He was struggling with bug lust just like I was. He obviously was smarter than most but still he liked beer and pussy as much as the rest of us.

Andy was younger that Larry, Nan and I. He seemed to have a bit of a dark side. Seemingly he was headed to that place in life were the strange turns ugly. I can’t tell you for sure he didn’t end up a preacher of the Gospel but I wouldn’t bet on it. While the rest of us would smoke pot Andy would eat almost anything that came his way in pill form. All of the rest of us had tried acid once or twice and had pretty much said fuck this pill shit. We stuck with good old Columbian.

But there were days when Andy was so jittery, so shaky that you knew he was as Lou Reed put James Dean for a day just speeding away. But back then the credo was do you own thing as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else so we didn’t feel any need to intervene. We shook our heads a bit and figured his parent’s would bust him but we didn’t meddle.

Andy’s stories always had the edge that something was being left out. They got murky at points and you could only assume that something had happened there and the reality had gone really wrong or whatever had been done was beyond the pale of what any of the rest of us would have been involved in. The rest of us might be criminals because we bought and smoked weed but were didn’t steal or strong arm anyone.

Still Andy had his good qualities. Andy loved Bruce Springsteen. In 1974 he was quoting all the songs that would be on Born to Run two years before the album was even out. He would always be humming and singing a lyric from Jungleland.

Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge
Drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain
The Rat pulls into town rolls up his pants
Together they take a stab at romance
And disappear down Flamingo Lane.

Larry, Andy and I we were all the products of working class dads and moms. We heard the stories about the hard times and struggle each meal when we said we weren’t going to eat scrapple, broccoli or kale. The depression stories got old. This was the 1970s the world was ours for the taking. It was America on the upsurge. We were punk assed kids expecting to do better.

Nan wasn’t like us she had grace that you didn’t find in the homes of South Jersey factory rats. We were scruffy. She was beautiful. We were all asses and elbows incompetent and she exuded cool. Our tongues tied at moments when she was funny and fired off that quick quip.

She was a beauty and proud of her sensuality. She wore amber aviator shades that just said “I am hot”. She wore tube tops promoting those perky puppies of hers. When she bent over to serve ice cream the Dad’s lingered a little too long at the window for the Mom’s liking. If you watched you could see the come on let’s go tug on the hand, the sleeve or the shoulder material. Nan’s cup was Heroin. Mine was Morphine. We were toxic together.

From the first day we worked together at Kurly Kustard there was some kind of connection between us. I may be wrong but I thought there was. We laughed at the same shit. We riffed about right and wrong and the injustices being inflicted on us by our evil overlord. When I looked at her she had a golden aura. Teen love/lust does stuff to your vision. Mostly it stuffs your head up your butt. Still, she was one of that less than a handful of women I ever really fell in love with, God’s honest truth. For me the time I tried to be in her life was disastrous, but it was a memory.

There were moments of absurdity at Kurly Kustard. For example there was this French Canadian dude that insisted on trying to pay me in Canadian funds. No bank in 1974 Ocean City would take the old Canadian one dollar bills with the Queen on ‘em. I refused when the folding foreign money was offered to accept it as currency. I stood my ground and demanded he pay me in American script.

Let us call this guy Jacques. Jacques had the Canadian currency in his right hand. When it clear I was not going to accept these bills he pulled out the America cash from his pocket with his left hand. That left mitt was the most deformed hand I had ever seen. It was Hunchback of Notre Dame deformed, twisted and gnarled and it was clear the sucker had gone through this exercise on purpose. He knew I wasn’t going to take the Canuck money and he wanted to make me deal with his weird two thumbed left hand. Arrgggh. Another life lesson learned. People will screw with your mind on purpose.

We had celebrities come by. I remember waiting on John Facenda the voice of NFL films. Man his voice was as deep when he ordered a coke as when he was describing the Packer’s greatest game. Other people were working at the stand the night Princess Grace came by. I never saw her but everyone who had been at the store made sure I knew they had. I saw Princess Stephanie but not Princess Grace and she was on the beach in a bathing suit. Nayh, Nayh, Nayh Nah.

As I have been writing this I have come back to one image again and again. In the pale blue light on a low volume boardwalk day Nan stands near the front counter. With her hair pulled back and with her hands on her hips she is looking at the late afternoon ocean. Her hair blows a little because it is a sea breeze coming in and she is smiling. A quiet moment standing there absorbing the remains of the day in almost a Buddha like stance she remains an iconic image, mistress of the beach world universe. I think what ultimately kept our connection alive for years after Kurly Kustand had ceased to even exist was an innate honesty. When you care honesty matters, (as always I have to have a segue into the analysis of On Caring).

The author spends a little time of this section laying some background down before he gets to the role of honesty in caring. He tries to make sure when we are considering honesty we are not focused on something that is not the honesty he is talking about.

“In caring honesty is trying to see truly”. Honesty is not imposing an image on the other of what you want them to be or what you dream they are inside. To be honest in caring means stripping away the illusions we impose and the other asserts as reality and see what is true “even when the facts are unpleasant”. The illusions that must fall include my illusions about who I really am and what my real motives are. The question must be repeatedly asked, do I really want the other to grow or do I want to manipulate the other for my own selfish needs? If I work at honesty in seeing the other and seeing why I am caring about this particular other when I make mistakes the error will be easier to correct.

You cannot be there for the other if you are not genuine and thus you cannot pretend to be something you are not. I may not be perfect but caring doesn’t require that I exist without imperfection and flaws, only that I continue to look inside and honestly perceive what my real motivations for the other and myself are.

Like everything in this little book the concept of honesty seems so intuitive, so easily understood. But to take the time to look inside yourself to see your actual motives is as hard a task as any I know. I think to do this we have to give ourselves space, a moment for a mental breath. Creating this space may require time or it might require us to silence our mind’s never ending make work thoughts. Maybe it will require both but I think the effort will be worth it.

The Joy Found in a Notecard

In bright colors my cares evaporate.

Brilliant hued exotic flowers shout celebration to me,
of life, of wonder and of full awareness.

Peacefully I lay down in a their radiant bed,
I am cradled with delicate petals and stems.

As I breathe in the fragrant air I am freed
from the normal,
from the monotonous sameness that others relish.

Nestled softly here I
Have hope that today
and tomorrow will be allow me to be
all those good things inside of me that I know I am.
Have the patience and honesty to grow
as each of these blooms has grown
into something radiant and beautiful beyond words.
Have humility that I am as frail as these blossoms
and as short lived in eternity.
Have trust that there is something greater.
And have the courage to face whatever will come.

There is no guilt in taking a respite in this beauty.
There is no crime in experiencing joy.

In bright colors I find a constancy of love.

Of Books and the Beach VI- Water-skis, Myopia and Camp Sunshine*

On those mornings when I wasn’t lying on the beach and when the sun was shining and when I wasn’t too wrecked still from the night before I engaged in the one physical endeavor of my life that might qualify as sport. Might is emphasized here. I water-skied.

At the time there was a triumvirate that was my real social circle, Don, Bill and me. Don had the boat and the skis and was my faux cousin. He was the grandson of one of my father’s best friends. Bill was my cousin but he was actually related to Don. Don and Bill if I remember my tables of consanguinity correctly were second cousins. These tables are important to a family from Kentucky. If you know them well you also know who you can sleep with at family reunions without going directly to hell.

If it was a calm morning wind and mental wise we would all jump into Don’s car and head over to his father’s place. There we would transfer cars and grab his Dad’s boat and set off for the Great Egg Harbor. The Great Egg Harbor lies between the mainland and the barrier island that is Ocean City. It amazes me that we didn’t just scrap this most days because of the time involved. But when you’re 19 time is forever and definitely relative.

The first time we headed out I didn’t realize what a bunch of fuckups I was throwing in with. I felt okay with the prospect of being in a boat because I was a decent swimmer; I had been swimming since I was five. Had I known that we were heading out with bogus equipment and two guys with a bit of a sado-masochistic attitude I might have hesitated.

If you have never water-skied I got to tell you there is a bit of a learning curve. On a normal pair of skis you kind of bob about in the water and get pulled along in a crouching position. Normal skis have a small fin on the bottom of them to help keep your feet aligned in a straight path. The crouching position brings with it a spray that aims directly at your anus. When skiing on the estuaries of an ocean this can best be described as a high pressure salt water enema, really.

Everyone who starts skiing has to endure to a greater or lesser degree this saline high colonic. However that assumes you are skiing on normal water skis. Banana skis are not conducive to getting upright on a 1st time out for the novice water skier. About 2 foot long and 1 ½ wide using banana skis is kind of like setting out with garbage can lids tied to your feet. Have you ever seen a Bendo® toy figure? Yeah my skinny legs were kind of like that all akimbo and twisted in the wrong direction as I tried to get up again and again. It took two or three days of saline colon washing before I got to actually to “ski”. But I did and I got better over time.

Maybe determination was something my move to beach world gave me. I wanted to be normal despite my myopia. I wanted to have fun behind the boat. My friends were willing to give me the chance. Despite the aquatic violation of my lower bowel system (really this was quite memorable it you haven’t figured that part out yet), my aching ankles and my wrenched forearms and wrist (sore from way too tight a grip on the rope and not anything else thank you) being part of the three loons or whatever we three tanned northern wahoos called ourselves was important to my growth.

What was really important was that Bill and Don were willing to invite me into this world. They didn’t really know me from Adam when I first got to Ocean City except that I came across as a snot who was out of his element. But Don who was so mellow back then, clearly had the patience to let me sort out how I fit into this whole picture. You know that the act of waiting for me to get ready, to start and to watch me fall 25 or 50 times could not have been fun except to a sadist. But for whatever reason they thought it would be fun to get me up onto skis. It was this and a hundred other acts of kindness that bonded me to them for life.

It can’t be said that waterskiing on the Great Egg Harbor didn’t have its downside especially for the normally sighted. People who voluntarily go to nudist camps are not people that I and most probably you would want to see naked. We are not talking super models there to remove tan lines. We are not talking Christian Bale and Jude Law engaged in a Women in Love wrestling match. What we are talking about is older people with names like Miriam and Floyd who while their naughty bits and pieces might be pleasing in the dark are downright scary in the light. In fact Floyd has a restraining order against a disabled guy with one leg goes by the name of Ahab and carries a harpoon. But these naked folks do have that certain lack of inhibition that lets them lay about on the dock out by the edge of open water ostensibly to soak up the rays while getting a cooling breeze off the water.

So there I would be on those full bananas tooling along the mainland side. I’d be jumping the wake, skiing sideways and trying all kind of goofy stuff. It was a blast. But routinely Bill and Don would take the boat a little too close to the sandbar. The problem with that side of the water was the shallow over near Camp Sunshine. As we whipped over by the shallow water the feel of the bay’s surface changes. I don’t know causes this, maybe it is because the water is so much shallower the drag on the skis is different. Every time I rode the skis over near the sandbar I would trip, stumble and go down. After I dropped the rope the guys in the boat would have to circle back slow to retrieve me.

Now a slow pass by Camp Sunshine didn’t mean shit to me. My vision is 20/50 with glasses and without them the world is a Monet painting. To the guys in the boat the situation was much different. As they would slow to almost a stop to make sure I got the rope and got ready to be pulled to upright all the naked folks over on the dock would stand up. Floyd, Miriam and three or four others would stand up and wave. When I say wave they would really wave using anything that would swing.

Sputtering profanity Bill and Don would threaten me with abandonment if I ever fell in front of the nudist colony again. Like I cared, but then again with my vision I don’t have to have the vision of naked Floyd surgically eradicated from my memory.

Don and Bill’s patience on those days we spent on the water was immense and gracious. Their efforts to help me get up onto the skis provide a good segue into Section 6 of On Caring. Repeatedly and with only good natured kidding they gave me chance after chance until I finally got up into a crouching position on the skis. My struggles to get up and actually ski probably cost them two or three mornings of their lives. But they were friends and they cared. I don’t know why they cared but they did. Maybe it was the brotherhood of the beach, or maybe they thought they were helping a fellow social cripple, a dorkus maximus.

Patience is the focus of Section 6. Patience means we give space to the other that person you wish to aid in growth. Impatience steals the time that is necessary for growth. Being patient is a necessary component of caring. Patience does not require action but it does require awareness. Patience is not passive; it is a state of watchfully allowing another to grow and develop. Patience is not just time focused but also context focused.

Allowing another to make the errors and take the wrong paths that lead to growth is a balancing act. Tolerance and knowledge are the watchwords. The tricky part in this balancing act is letting the other learn by trial and error but having the honesty to confront/approach the other when by making the wrong choice again and again nothing has been learned.

Of Beach and Books V *

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.

Of Beach and Books IV (Night Ride Home)

There is a smell to the ocean that is unique. What you sense is not one smell. Each cove and bay and bit of open shoreline has its own scent. The sea grasses that hold the dune in place in North Carolina smell different than the various reeds and runners that serve the same function in New Jersey. Every beach after a storm smells different that it does during a hot dry 10 day stretch. Still the smell is very visceral, very primal. When I travel I can tell when I am about 10 miles from the beach because the air changes in a palpable way. I don’t know if everyone senses this but I can feel the shore approach.

One of the strongest memories I have of the years on the beach was of the smell and feel of the sea air at midnight. After I would close down the store, Kurly Kustard to be precise, I would get on a 10 speed bike and wheel down the wet boardwalk. It was about a twenty minute ride home.

Shutting down the store wasn’t an instantaneous process. It took a bit of time to break down the store. You had to disassemble the custard machines and drop the blades and gaskets and knobs into sanitizer. You had already blended the sanitizer if you were smart. All remaining dairy product had been drained and put away for the night in the walk-in cooler. The fountain heads had been removed from the soda fountain and the store's awning rolled up. The windows had been slid across the opening onto the boardwalk and locked into place.

After stashing the cash I would go out the back door. At the base of the back steps I would pick up my bike. If I was lucky and had a roach I would burn that mother crushing it at the very end and swallowing the roach. I was a weird fucker that way. It just seemed to me better to get all the THC in me and not to leave any evidence on the ground just in case the gendarmes were about. I would throw my chain and lock into my backpack and off I would fly.

The rules of the boardwalk prohibited me riding my bike on it at that hour. A few blocks down south of the store the cops stopped enforcing the rules. Reaching there I was free to leave the surface streets and tool down the damp and sometimes quite wet boards at whatever speed I deemed safe. On the right night I was free and I was flying.

On a late summer nights under the influence of cheap assed Mexican reefer if the moon was up the ride became a religious service with its own sacraments. My muscles would flow smoothly and the bike was just an extension of my desire to be moving. Riding wouldn’t require thinking it would just require being. On those nights as I swooshed down those blocks elevated over the ghostly illuminated white sands of the beach I would glance out at the reflection of the sun’s little brother over the water. The air was cool but comfortable as I split its molecules on my ride.

Invariably I would stop near the end of the boardwalk and just stare out at infinity.

The water was dark except where the moonlight bled across it. The air smelled of sea rocket dune grass and of damp sand. I would breathe in deeply and just listen to the waves. At that spot the beach air was somewhat sweet and soothing, breathing was like drinking some Thai lemongrass soup refreshing and cleansing. Every sense was alive from the endorphins my muscles were producing to my eyes to that sound of waves in my ears. It is almost like my life began and ended at that moment.

You got the beach and the bicycle in the paragraphs above, now it is back to On Caring

Mayeroff shifts gears just a little bit when he moves into Section II. Having identified caring as helping another to grow he lists and discusses traits of appropriate caring. When you read each of the attributes of caring they sound for the most part a great deal like a Boy Scout oath. The qualities he cites are knowing, alternating rhythms, patience, honesty, trust, humility, hope and courage. The funny thing is that while these sound simple and easily understandable the reality of each characteristic is deceptive. It is like an old bumper sticker I remember, “Live Peace”. As we used to opine about that sticker, easy to say, hard to do and life changing if you try.

Section II of the book commences with the attribute of knowing. The author begins by saying caring is neither good intentions nor warm regards. (The Buddhists say one small good deed is worth more than the greatest of good intentions.) Caring begins with knowledge. Knowledge is not a monolith or a single granite direction marker.

Knowledge in caring according to Mayeroff breaks down three ways. One way is breaks down is a requirement of knowing what the other needs and knowing what you can really provide. The next breakdown of the attribute is what you know explicitly about the other and what you know implicitly. A final delineation is being aware that knowing can be direct and indirect.

Huh, what? This is all too murky. No it isn’t. To care I must know the other’s needs. I need to know, really know who the other is, not just to have a surface knowledge about who them present themselves as. I have to take the time to understand the other’s strengths and weakness and what will move the other to real growth before I step into a task of caring.

While Mayeroff only cites it quickly in one line a critical theme of self knowledge arises on the bottom of the first page of this section. I must know what my own powers and limitations are. In almost every section of this book Mayeroff talks about being aware of what you are, being secure in who you are, realizing your limitations both as to yourself and as to your relationship with others. What he keeps saying is that you have to be at peace with yourself and know what you are trying to give the other and what growth you are trying to motivate in the other and in yourself.

I think the fact that Mayeroff accepts that we know things about who we are and what we can give to another on an implicit or gut level shows he really understands us humans. Sometimes we can put this stuff into words but other times we can simply know it without the words. I think his comment at the end about limiting caring to only things that we can put into words is arbitrary is dead on the mark. We may know more than enough to care when we know ourselves and when we are aware of the realities of the world than we could ever communicate with words, even after 3 or 4 beers.

Of Beach and Books III

It is weird how tied On Caring is to my memory of that one specific place and time, 1970s Ocean City. Each time I pick up the book I can almost feel the sand on the pages and hear the ocean and the seagulls in the background. Even some of the smells of the suntan oils and perfumes of the day come back. Please forgive my little digressions into memory as I talk about the book.

To any person who has ever met me it is not secret that I am not a clothes horse. Hell, if my shirt and tie match it is a good day. I just don’t care about that stuff. I mean clean is important to me but not style. Well I may have one red tie that I just love that has a little style to it.

When I was at the beach my focus on style was different. During those 5 or so summers I was the consummate teen beach dweller. My clothes always aimed for boardwalk chic. When I could I wore white linen trousers and Mexican wedding blouses. On my feet I had leather sandals. My hair was long but not too long. By August it had turned auburn from the sun’s beating down on it all season. (I did not use lemon juice to lighten my hair although I knew those who did.) White linen looks good on a really tanned body if I do say so myself. Those soft clothes felt good too.

The separation from my home in Pedricktown let me focus on some weird funky sense of cool. The beach was a new world filled with new people. I wasn’t cast into the mold or rules that had governed my younger years in the rural farm town. I was free to be a cosmic hippie wannabe with a weird intellectual bent. I reinvented myself and I grew as a person. I cared about who I was and I cared about the world around me.

The time spent staring at the endless sea changed me and imbued me with a sense of what is possible in life and what is not. The sea is immutable and I had to accept that, in any battle with the Atlantic I would lose. However in the world of me, change became possible and remains always possible.

Now as to section 3 of On Caring (there is a bit of overlap of my beach memoir and the gist of the section). I think the following three paraphrased sections are the key. These as I have phrased them deal with human caring and not caring about an idea. I think if you read the section you will see the distinctions Mayeroff wants you to get on that specific point (caring for a person vs. caring for an idea) but my focus is on human beings primarily. What seems to me to be the most important lines of the text are:

• The minimum component of helping another grow is to help them care for something/someone apart from themselves. This means encouraging and helping someone find something to care about.

• I grow by becoming more self determining, by choosing my own values and ideals grounded in my own experience, instead of simply conforming to the prevailing values or compulsively rejecting them.

• A person grows by becoming more honest with him or herself and becoming more aware of the natural and social order of which she or he is a part with a minimum of illusion…

Being objective and living without illusion takes focus and I think it is a daily struggle.

Of Beach and Books II

On those rare days in beach world when I did not have to work in the evening I would stay late on the strand. My family’s apartment was 1 ½ blocks from the water. As a result it was nothing to come back to the apartment mid in late afternoon to have a snack. After a quick shuffle over Central Avenue and a couple of houses down Asbury I would just lay about inside out of the sun for a few minutes with an ice tea and the daily paper. The ice tea was a little different. Mom brewed it up from a southern brand Luzianne and she would dice up an entire orange into each gallon she’d brew.

After 15 minutes max I’d grab my towel and head back to the water’s edge. The sun would be dropping in the west but the air temperature would be in the low 80s on most of those summer days. In August it could be about 98 F even into early evening but August was a world until itself.

By the time I headed back to the beach in that warm but waning late afternoon light the day trippers (or we called them shoe-bees because they brought their lunches in shoe boxes) were streaming off the beach in droves. The wire waste baskets at the edge of the beach by the last service drive before the breakwater were filled a mile high with trash. With these easy pickings the seagulls were flying and screeching picking at dead fries and leftover sandwich pieces. A quick glance both ways up and down the beach and you saw maybe 10% of the people who had been there an hour before remained. These people were deeply tanned; these were the folks renting for the full season.

Making the weird schlop/klop noise that comes from cheap beach sandals I would walk across the hot sand. If the tide was going out I would grab a spot as close to the water as I could. Reaching the water’s edge I would lay my towel down, drop my sandals, t-shirt, glasses and hat and would jump in the ocean for a few moments of body surfing. With fewer people around me on the sand I would pull out one of the harder books I had picked for the summer and dive into it. It was easier to concentrate at that hour of the day.

The life guards were still on until six. Often I would get to watch them pack up their gear and leave. Beach beefcake and pinups, there were no ugly lifeguards. The people remaining after the guards left were mostly beach walkers. These were the folks that strolled for miles up and down the beach just to walk. I was a beach walker too but I would do it late in the evening with a pack of Marlboros in my beach shirt pocket. It takes a special talent to light a cigarette on a windy beach at night.

My favorite part of the day’s end was watching the light disappear. When you are looking at the Atlantic you don’t see brilliant colors from the sunset. You have to be on the other side of the island to see that. What you see is the color of the ocean changing. It goes from bright reflective blue, almost the image of a broken mirror, to a white gray to a dark green black over about two or so hours.

It is that shift to the point where the water is reflecting the pale light of mid twilight that I loved the best. I always thought I was as close to God and I ever would be at that time. Sometimes I would just walk out into the water and let my mind go blank just experienced the warm water and warm air and a complete lack of self. It wouldn’t last long but it was an amazing moment because even to this day I can remember the peace I felt.

Reading On Caring required me to go searching for a clearer meaning of one term actualization. If that isn’t psychological jargon speak what is? Getting an explanation of a key term was essential to mentally getting access to On Caring. The term actualization is really/kind of/sort of an adaptation of a guy named Maslow’s term self actualization. Self actualization is a wonky jargon word to express a real straightforward concept. Back then sorting out the phrase sent me to the used book store to look at psychology books (but not for too long or they want me to buy). This time I cribbed and tweaked the following off the Internet.

Maslow loosely defined self-actualization as "the full use of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc.” He set this out in his book Motivation and Personality. Self-actualization is not a static but it is rather an ongoing process in which one's capacities are fully, creatively, and joyfully utilized. One of the sites I looked at implied this was a direct quote from Maslow himself, "I think of the self-actualizing person not as an ordinary person with something added. An actualizing person is an ordinary person with nothing taken away. The average person is a full human being with dampened and inhibited powers and capacities"

Self-actualizing people see life clearly. They are less emotional, more objective and less likely to allow hopes, fears, or ego to distort their observations. Self-actualizing people are dedicated to other people, to vocations and to causes. Major characteristics of self-actualizing people include creativity, spontaneity, courage, growth and hard work. This is the tie to On Caring.

Lying on the beach sand waiting for the water to change to silver I tried to grok this.