"Ghosts on the Boardwalk"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Ghosts on the Boardwalk”

September 9, 2023

 

“We’re all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.”

                                                                                              Liam Callanan (1968-)

                                                                                              The Cloud Atlas, 2004

                                                                                              (Edgar Award for best first novel by an American author)

 

“If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts.” Those lyrics, written and sung by Adam Durwitz, are from the song “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby.” They reflect a truism, at least for me. As well, ghosts are common in literature. Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Washington Irving, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and J.R.R. Tolkien included spirits and ghosts in their stories.  

 

Embedded in memory, they flit in and out of my consciousness, triggered by a word, song or a photo. On a table in our living room, a digital picture frame presents a new photo every few minutes, letting the past slip into the present, recalling days gone by, and reminding me of those known and loved.

 

The beach club we belong to in New Jersey provides an embracing venue for such memories. It is where Caroline spent summers growing up. It is where our children spent a month or two every summer while they were growing up. And it is place familiar to our grandchildren. Caroline’s family has a long history there. Our bath house, where spirits of dead ancestors watch over never-known descendants, has been in her family since at least 1931. Her maternal grandparents joined the club a few years after its founding in the late 19^thCentury. My in-laws joined in 1931, and we joined in 1972. 

 

Some things change; others do not. The ocean, cleaner that it was half a century ago, is still captive to the motion of unchanging tides. The beach has shrunk and expanded. The people are different, yet faces are familiar. Walking along the boardwalk, I pass by tables seating children and grandchildren of those I knew sixty years ago. There are differences. In the mid and late ‘60s dress was more formal. Some of the older men, like my father-in-law, wore ties, and most of the older women wore dresses and low heels. One was more likely to see a cocktail than a glass of wine on the table. The times were more formal: gentlemen stood for ladies; we referred to our elders by Mrs. or Mr. But conversations have a familiar ring – families, current events, books read, movies seen, and gossip about neighbors.

 

We are forged in a crucible that includes genes from our forefathers and the environment in which we were raised and now live, combined with the influence of family, friends, coaches, and teachers. In returning to the club each August, I recall those no longer with us. I miss their greetings, their smiles and witticisms. While their loss is felt, I don’t despair. They live on, ghosts in my memory.

 

John Donne, who often wrote of the supernatural, began his short poem Meditations XVII: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man/is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;” Donne was writing of the metaphysical mysteries of death, but his words apply to our interconnected lives, where the past is linked to the present and future. I see those connections as ghosts, as I walk down the boardwalk.