The A.C.

And lo, I am returned from the weekend, and it was good. My car survived the trip, which is fairly unremarkable considering I just bought the thing a little over a year ago as a new-used with less than 30K on the odometer, but in fact until this past weekend I had never taken my car on a roadtrip longer than the workaday commute, since the vast majority of roadtripping these days involves my whole family and thus we pile into my wife’s roomier sedan and leave my li’l beater at home. Also worth mentioning as a complicating element is the fact that, twice in the last month or two, my car has refused to start in the morning due to battery lifelessness. Once was because of an interior light being left on overnight, but I swear the other time was for no reason whatsoever, and although each time the battery came back to life with a simple jumpstart and showed no other ill effects, I was still somewhat worried that I would drive all the way to the pine barrens and then not be able to get back (or only get back on a much-modified timetable) due to another untimely battery death. Luckily those fears proved unfounded and the experiment which was my first extended travel in my current car was a success.

It was somewhat nostalgia-inducing to return to the state where I spent fourth through twelfth grade and the vast majority of my college breaks, although geography had very little to do with it; the southern reaches which were my destination, the old 609, are tantamount to a completely different world than the rest of the Garden State, including where I specifically grew up (I’m given to understand that if it were not unconstitutional to make new states out of old, the two leading contenders for their own stars on Old Glory would be East Kansas and South Jersey). Still, the nine-man guest list for the bachelor party weekend included my two brothers, four of my brother’s childhood friends whom I’ve thus known for decades, and another couple of later-life friends whom I only ever saw and interacted with in the old northern Jersey stomping grounds. That’s probably where the majority of the retro feelings came from, although even that was almost overshadowed by the strange realization (it shouldn’t be that strange or that big of a realization, but there it is) that even my Little Bro and his peers are getting older: getting married, buying houses, having kids; in other words, hitting their mid-30’s. So I was reminded quite a bit about high school days and at the same time reminded that those days are pretty long gone, and maybe nostalgia isn’t the right word for it because there was no sense of longing or wishing that I could turn back the clock. Just a bit of a mental break from my usual routine of obsessing over what’s going on right now, what’s on my to-do list and what upcoming obligations are on the horizon, and going back through memories, some good, some awful, but all mine.

I missed the Friday night portion of the festivities but I gathered that it mostly involved sitting around the camp cabins (three of them which could sleep four people each) listening to music and drinking. Saturday ran the gamut from Frisbee and grilling to a trivia contest designed and implemented by my Little Bro and all about my Little Bro (hey, it was his weekend) to an evening excursion to Atlantic City for go-karts, boardwalk-roving, gambling (both of the casino variety which happily produced a good deal of winnings at the roulette table, and of the spontaneous variety involving an arcade punching bag strength-meter and the low-scorer being forced to get a henna tattoo of the word Princess across his lower back), steakhouse dinner and other entertainment. The point is that Little Bro had an excellent time, as did everyone involved (even the tattooed party member).


One thing that did strike me, both at the time and in recollection, is how much time at the campsite was spent talking about the weather. April on the mid-Atlantic is famously variable and we were lucky in that it was neither unseasonably warm nor unseasonably cold, and the rain didn’t come until late Saturday night. There was, however, a marked difference in temperature between what one felt standing or walking around out in the sunshine and what one felt under the shade of the pines, including especially in the cabins themselves. People made mention of this so many times I started consciously noting it and then made mention of it so many more times I lost count. I was amused to be given such a blatant indicator of our common backgrounds as sheltered, upper-middle-class suburban kids. We all grew up in houses in developments with central AC but no shade trees, and the fact that the crude structures of our humble cabins could have such similar thermal contrasts just about blew our damn minds. Oh what would our pioneer forebears make of us and our pampered ways? I guess it kind of makes the whole North Jersey/South Jersey, industrial/agricultural dichotomy a bit moot. My cohorts and I truly are the suburbs generation.