We went to Long Beach Island, off the Jersey shore, a few weeks ago. I’ve been there often but never before May — it was still winterish there, hardly anything open and just lovely. We came with friends for my husband’s birthday — four adults and four little kids. It’s so much fun to be there with little people searching the beach for shells in their parkas and climbing all over the furniture. We took them to Barnegat Light — a 150 year old lighthouse I’ve loved since I was a kid.
It was a 20 minute walk in very cold weather, everyone excited about seeing a real live lighthouse. Somehow anything, no matter how many times you’ve seen it, looks brand new when you see it with small children. When it’s new to them, it becomes new to you too.
It was, according to my husband, a perfect birthday. Much of the credit for that goes to the friends who came with us, who wrote and performed a song for him as a gift because "you have too much stuff already" and, in so many ways have taken us into their lives with love. I just posted a meditation on being a ‘fake grandmother" on the SV Moms "over 50" blog, where I’m a new contributor. It’s such a peculiar privilege – hanging out with preschoolers in that easy way that can only happen with frequent contact.
Here’s a little bit of what I said:
Once, I picked one of the kids
up at nursery school when his mother was sick. As I walked into the room,
he jumped up from "circle time" on the floor and ran around the room
yelling "Cindy’s here, Cindy’s here!" If there is a better
feeling than that, I don’t know what it is. (Maybe when it’s your own
grandchildren…but still it’s just so lovely.)
I wish you could have seen us sitting around the living room, the ocean booming out the window, sun shining on the water like a corny travel poster. It just proves to me (as if I needed evidence) that "Down the shore everything’s [still] alright." Just as we knew it was. And we are blessed that it is so.