(Above: Polly’s Pond… “at the end of Monmouth Avenue, at the mouth of Oyster Bay, on the edge of Shrewsbury River.” The scene of many fond memories from the 1950s… Revisited in May, 2018)
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… might have been right about that. But that sure doesn’t stop some of us from trying.
I’ve been trying to “go home again” for… oh, 50 years or so now…
And I tried again earlier this month.
First, I drove up to Cape May, New Jersey for a week-long photography workshop.
When the workshop was over, I looked at the map and saw that a) I was only 2 hours away from the town where I’d been a kid, Rumson, NJ; and b) making that side trip would not add any time to my return drive to Tennessee.
The Garden State Parkways starts here in Cape May.
So I headed up the Garden State Park from Exit 0 to Exit 109 and the Jersey Shore.
The last time I was there was in 2002, when my brother and sister and I (and some of their issue) returned to comply with our mother’s last wish: that her ashes be spread in the riverside town where she spent the happiest years of her life with her first husband, Harvey.
This trip was important because over the past year I have been dredging up and finding ways to revisit and hopefully dispel the buried traumas of how I happened to be removed from the place that I still think of as “My Hometown.”
I’ve posted two new items that describe the quest. Please follow these links to:
and
A 180º panorama of Monmouth Avenue. It was a great neighborhood for kids and bicycles.
No helmets required. Click to embiggen.