Monica Singer
Last Thursday evening, my husband and I drove one town over to Cape May for dinner while my in-laws watched the kids at our rental condo. I felt a pang of jealousy when I saw a young lifeguard, maybe 16 or 17, riding home from work on her bike, her long blonde hair flowing in the wind as the sun shone down upon her. She looked like she belonged on a post card that read: "Greetings from the Shore!" or "Fun in the Sun!" Both with exclamation points, because a card from beach calls for it.
I wanna be her, I thought. Perhaps she'd head home to get ready for a night out dancing with her summer friends. Or maybe she'd fix some crab cakes for dinner and watch the sun set over the bay.
And then I snapped out of it.
The lifeguard on her bike probably wasn't thinking, How lucky am I to live so very near the beach? She was probably thinking, I wish I had a car. And, perhaps, I need new flip-flops, because the right one is about to break off my foot and into all this damn tourist traffic.
Life can only be a beach when you don't live there.
If I bought a house "down the shore," as we call it in New Jersey, I'd have to enroll the kids in a different school, and my husband would have to get a job down there, because three hours each way is too darn long a commute. We'd move our stuff and our lives and our bills and the laundry that's always piled up way too high from one location to another.
We'd probably get down to the beach to barbecue and swim now and then, just like we do at our community lake. But when we return home, we'd check our e-mail and empty the dishwasher. We sit out on the deck and have cocktails only on Fridays after work, if that, and we certainly wouldn't fly kites every single night. Not like we do when we're on vacation down the shore.
By the end of our trip, I pack up, leaving behind the real estate guides and any inclination toward moving to a house near the ocean. This year, like every other year, I was ready to come home by the time we'd stripped the beds of our sheets. Also, to go to our lake a little more often.
Life might not be a beach, but maybe Saturday will be.
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