Missing My Coney Island
Memories
Coney Island, do you miss me?
Do you remember how many summers I flip flopped from your boardwalk onto your white sand to wade in your welcoming surf?
Do you ever reminisce how I celebrated the passage of spring by parading on your promenade on unseasonably warm April days, when the wind was calm and the sun was shimmering on the water? Then went home for a cup of hot chocolate.
A lifetime ago, when I was just a kid, my uncle worked at Nathan’s Famous. He always waved as I walked by and winked. He knew it wasn’t yet summer, that we were ditching school; my friends and I out enjoying the day, lounging on a seaside pier, gazing at the amusement park, anticipating our turn to ride.
I wore a tee shirt with a logo of the Wonder Wheel, but the Cyclone roller coaster was another one of our favorites.
My family moved and for a long time I didn’t speak to my parents for taking me away from my friends and the beach. They didn’t seem to care, consumed with their own problems and constantly fighting with each other. There was no peace in the new house. I wanted to go live with my uncle.
My uncle said he would never leave New York. He kept repeating he would miss me but that we would all get together for Christmas, one way or another. He was right in a way. My mother packed us up for the holidays, all except daddy’s bags. She never looked back. Maybe there would be peace in Brooklyn, for a change.
I can still picture the Parachute Jump, a mass of intricately woven metal and memories from my late teens. Summer was tortuously hot that year and the sea breeze brought some relief. It was too hellish to be in love with the boy next door. With a lemon ice in my fist, and his arm around my shoulder, he made me stop for a sweaty, salty kiss under the Parachute Jump.
We would pretend it was our homespun version of the Eiffel Tower and would ask some innocent-looking stranger to take a photograph of the two of us. Someone who looked like they wouldn’t run away with our camera. And never, ever, someone on a bike.
The landscape of Coney Island was beautiful back then, before the restoration. But, the renaissance was kind of glorious and spectacular.
I want you to know that I miss you, Coney Island.
After all this time. And degrees of separation — Highways and bridges.
The ones that will bring us back to walk the boardwalk and splash in the waves once again.
