Remembering Hurricane Bill
Monday, August 24th, 2009Remembering Hurricane Bill
“Bill’s Effects on the Jersey Shore: Lots of Churning, but no disasters.” I knew when I picked up the Philadelphia paper that the headline referred to Hurricane Bill, which thankfully did not slam into the coast of New Jersey as vacationers were enjoying the last of summer. This week, fleeing the sticky weather inland, scores of us braved long waits at toll plazas and near accidents in New Jersey’s infamous traffic circles, seeking ocean breezes and one last romp in salt spray.
Yes, I knew that menacing wave heights and rip tides under the frothy surface of a seemingly perfect Jersey beach day were evidence of a serious storm out to sea, a storm that has taken lives, a storm that is no laughing matter. Still, as I read news accounts this morning, I couldn’t help but chuckle, and I wondered briefly whether my sisters and I had unintentionally stirred up the Atlantic. From four states across the country, my three sisters and I gathered this week. We met up on Long Beach Island, NJ, a place where we spent much of our collective childhood, and we brought a Bill we all knew could certainly make waves when he wanted to. We came to scatter the ashes of our father, Bill, in a place that always brought him joy and a kind of peace he didn’t evidence in many other parts of his life. Under a perfect canopy of bright white stars, we four sisters shared memories of our mutual parents and of those always barefoot summers. One recited a prayer, all of us said goodbye, and there was a lot of laughter punctuated liberally by one refrain: “No,no, that’s not the way it happened. This is what happened. . .”
As a writer and a teacher, as a person, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by how fuzzy and indefinable that line can be between memoir and fiction. “Any story told twice,” the late poet/writer Grace Paley once said to an interviewer, “is fiction.” As soon as we have an experience, we start to frame in our own minds “the story” of what just occurred. We choose, like all good story tellers do, the details to include. We illuminate the feelings we want to convey. I suspect we leave out details and feelings that either didn’t register with us, or which don’t enhance the tale we’ve already begun to craft in our minds of the experience. And then we retell the tale and it changes in the retelling. What we remember, where we focus our attention from the first, the details we share, are all colored by our temperment, our age or life stage, our past experience, our moods of the moment.
We stood on soft cool sand on a hot summer night, all of us in our fifties and sixties, and each of us remembered our own Long Beach Island. None of us was sure who was right about what year was the year when– and who was actually on the beach the year that– hundreds of starfish washed ashore and we gathered them in buckets and brought them home to a distressed, or delighted, depending on which of us you ask, mother. We all remembered that she made us grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. We couldn’t agree on whether the way our father hauled us past our fears into sometimes churlish waters, how he made sure we all learned to swim, was an act of kindness or harshness, though we were all glad we’d become confident swimmers.
And then we let him go, and the man who taught us all to duck under the biggest breakers and back float over the calm rolling waves became part of the Atlantic Ocean we all knew he’d loved.
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