Now the wild rumpus can begin

nevver:

Yearbook

therealeckerdcollege:

but everyone is like, 

The allure of summer time never ceases to amaze me. The long bright days illuminate the face of anyone that walks outside, the heat of the last recent high noon still slowing their step, even long after the sun is gone. No flavor compliments the sun’s warm embrace more than the salt of the sea, providing the final accent to the bouquet d’estate. I don’t know why the ocean has such a pull over me; it calls my name no matter where I am. Yet it’s not the name my parents gave me, Caitlin, that I hear; it’s a name that can’t be spoken, a name for a part of me that not even I can lay a finger on. 

My extreme love of the water was a running joke through my childhood. The day I was born, my mother was body surfing in the pacific ocean. A once avid surfer and still quintessential San Diego blonde bombshell, she still says the reason I came a week early was because I knew she was in the water and just couldn’t wait any longer to dive in. Although born in California, I was raised in New Jersey. The cold northeast winters added to the allure of summer; it was something to be cherished and savored for a few short months out of the year. Nothing could compare to the excitement that I would feel before the first beach trip of the season: not snowball fights or piles of leaves to jump into or trees erupting with the pastels of spring. Every school year, days were spent dreaming and distracted by memories of the surf and the sand, the tingle of the sun dancing across my skin. Next to illegible notes on the American Revolution and the water cycle were inked palm trees, penned waves danced in and out of the red lined college-ruled notebook paper. 

In January of my 6th grade year, my parents decided we were going to be taking our first family vacation that February. This trip was their last ditch attempt at salvaging the wreck that was becoming their union, a first in their 13 years of marriage. Never before had we left our home in northern New Jersey, 20 minutes from where my father worked in New York City, to go anywhere there wasn’t a family member. The strains of the Wall Street mindset my father had entered were taking their toll on my mother, and as she entered the bleakness of her twelfth northeastern winter, she was reaching her limits.  The destination seemed picked at random; a small city I’d never heard of in a state I’d never been to. But my parents promised it was warm there, just like summertime all year round.  Little did any of us know then how important that no-name city would become, how drastically it would someday change the courses of our lives.

I remember waking up after our early flight landed; dreary eyed I followed my mother, father, and two younger sisters through Tampa International Airport’s strange new corridors. We somehow found our way to the baggage claim, then out into the hazy, warm morning. I was astounded; the sting of cold air, the bite of winter had disappeared while I was sleeping in a climate controlled capsule. We sat as three cranky young girls, 12, 10, and 8, and a tired young mother on the curb, waiting for Dad to pull up in the rental car. I had requested a hot red convertible, just like the one my favorite Barbie was driving on the box she came in. Instead, he arrived in a gray, boring sedan.

I remember staring out the car window as I watched the water suddenly erupt over the horizon and the sun blaring in the sky. That first bridge felt as if it took 5 seconds and an hour to cross. I had never seen water so incredibly vivid and calm, the blues and greens of the scene around me a stark contrast to the persistent grays and whites that had become the daily spectrum of winter. It was like the feeling of San Diego, and for a minute I thought my parents had lied; we were actually in California and taking a surprise trip to visit my grandma. But then my Dad chimed in, “Once we get past this bridge, it’s only 20 minutes left to St. Pete Beach!” I instantly began deciding which new bathing suit I was going to put on as soon as we got to the hotel.

We stayed at the Beach House Suites by the Don Cesar, a smaller pink and white building down from the big palace. Our view was phenomenal, providing a breathtaking panoramic of the Gulf of Mexico and St. Pete Beach’s palm trees, the pool and bar below; yet every time I looked at the side of our hotel I thought of nothing but how it screamed 1980’s tourist cheese.  Down the beach just a short walk was the palace that I was told Marilyn Monroe loved to stay at. I could imagine her standing at the top, waving at her adoring fans, blowing them kisses with her bright red lips and the sun setting behind her. The second night we were staying in this summer refuge, we took a sunset stroll down the beach to the palace for a fancy family dinner. Holding our sandals, my sisters and I danced down the beach, running around each other and taking care that our nice dresses didn’t touch the water if we got too close. The red fire of the setting sun splashed across the sky, dripping pink down to the horizon of lit beachfront buildings and reflective, ebbing waters. For a moment, I stepped away from the group that was my family to admire this scene. They were still on the beach, talking and laughing, yet I felt compelled, almost by instinct, to walk a little closer to the setting sun.

I stepped into the salty bath until the waters were lapping at my ankles, and looked straight towards the sun setting over the horizon. I walked farther, pulled my dress up a little farther, and stopped only when my knees were fully submerged by the small incoming waves. The tide was out and the water shallow, and looking back my family seemed a good distance away. I turned back to the red ball of fire as it was slowly dipping down, firing out what seemed to be Aztec-like serpents across the lapping waters I was standing in. Their red, orange, and pink bodies shot across the small waves, weaving left and right, up and down, wrapping themselves around my legs. The sky behind the sun was encased by pink and orange clouds, spanning as far and wide as my eye could see. I was surrounded and immersed in this sunset, I felt to be completely a part of it. The world behind me dropped away, the bickering of  my sisters, the quarrels of a faltering marriage, the cold of the wintry north and as I suddenly realized, the cold of the people there. I was nothing more and nothing less than a part of the sunset around me, and in that moment, for the first time in my 12 short years, I began to truly understand.

I melted into the waters, and discovered respect for its gentle caress and stinging salt, and I began to imagine all the other people who might have done the same thing I was then doing. I felt an understanding that surpassed time, culture, or place, one of the greatness that was the sea I had just connected with, of what it was capable of giving. When I allowed my eyes to close for just a second, and simply felt the wind pushing my hair around my face, I felt free. The emotion was so overwhelming, and the connection with this place so strong that I couldn’t help but become a little startled, afraid of the magnitude of what my mind had just stumbled upon.

As I walked back towards the beach, after what felt like years had passed, I remembered a time the waters hadn’t been so gentle and caressing, a few years earlier. Reaching down I touched my knee, and felt the fading scar that had been left by sharp seashells. I had been 6, my sister Natalie 4, and we were at the beach by my grandma’s house in Quoque, a small town on the southeastern coast of Long Island. My mother and father were sitting on the beach with Tara, who was 2 at the time, and some family friends while I watched after Natalie and we played in the breaking waves. The tide was coming in, and a wave that met my nose crashed over us. I cleared the salty water from my eyes and stood up to see Natalie being dragged out by the waters. I ran with all the strength my small body could muster and leapt after her, my mothers earlier warning of riptides suddenly ringing in my ears. I fell hard against the sand as I grabbed onto her slippery arms, and digging my toes into the sand as deep as I could held on for dear life. It felt like an hour passed before the water finally receded and she could pull herself up, crying and shaken. I walked her smaller sobbing shoulders back to our blanket, not yet noticing the long cut on my knee, the salty red droplets falling onto my toes and the sand below. As my knee was later being cleaned up by my thankful mother, her friend, who’s long blonde hair was tucked delicately beneath her baseball cap, turned to me. “That’s a pride scar you’ve got there on your knee. You battled the sea and you won!” 

Those words came back to me as I walked away from those calm, yet blood red waters of the Gulf. It had been my first experience with what the sea can do, an early example of how powerful those ebbing tides could be. The calm waters I stood in felt almost paradoxical as I remembered the feeling of watching my younger sister being taken by them in another place, another day, another time. It was an interesting thought, to have beaten the sea. I believed it when I was 6, that the sea was something conquerable, something I could defeat. I had taken my sister back when Poseidon tried to grab at her, I had succeeded where Orpheus had failed with Hades. Yet from the myths I had read, I knew the Greek gods were never able to be tricked for long, and ultimately Poseidon’s power, the power that was the ocean water my feet bathed in, would win. I may have won the battle, but just like any other human, I would never win the war.  

The feeling of belonging and understanding I felt in that moment stayed with me through the rest of that bleak winter, only fueled the dreams of palm trees and waters that materialized next to geometry and biology. Time passed, with the trudging pace of a cold northeast winter. The bleak realities that set in after I became second in command at my household became the center of my attention, the dreams of white sands and memories of St. Pete’s Beach faded to the back of my mind, replaced. The city was never again visited, the memory so closely timed to the division of our nuclear home it wasn’t often discussed. Forgotten, until 5 years later, when I stumbled upon a name that at first made me laugh. Eckerd.

September 19, 2011. All Rights Reserved.

veronicajk:

How excited am I to go to Hickory Tree Pizza?…

(via veronicajk-deactivated20111012-)

Summer’s over and it makes me wanna cry.

chrispistachio:

kevinnicotera:

Rt. 18. New Brunswick, NJ. 8/28/11. Aftermath of Hurricane Irene.

Holy fuck, that’s absurd.

The night the moon shone its brightest in 21 years, it was drown by the lights of Hollywood while I drank with the stars.

____________________

The irregularly

Sporadically lit cherry lights

Divide the sky 

From Poseidon’s dark night

_____________________

As the stars fall towards the west

The delta aquarids meet the horizon’s

Black rumbling clouds.

Their impacts brighten the bulging monsters

Connecting with Poseidon’s flashing triton

Thrust from the black aquatic world

_______________________________

A beam came to me on the jetty,

The light of the moon smiling through the clouds

The winds changed their course,

Curving the storm around and past,

Opening the skies for Perseid’s showers

The flashes of impact illuminating

The uniform, fluffy fighter planes that had earlier flown over.

Poseidon crashed all around,

His dragon roaring, hissing

Spewing his damp salty flame upon my toes,

Misting my being.

(08/10/2011)

…tumblr, it’s nice to see you again.

Too good for words.

After a day at the races in England, a friend told Mark Twain, “I wish you’d buy me a ticket back to London. I’m broke.”

Twain told him he couldn’t afford two tickets but proposed that his friend sneak aboard the train and hide under Twain’s seat. Then he bought two tickets anyway.

When the train had got under way, the inspector appeared to collect Twain’s ticket. When Twain gave him two, he looked about the compartment and said, “Where’s the other one?”

Twain pointed under his seat, smiled, and said, “My friend is a little eccentric.”