By Louis Greenstein

THE SUMMER OF 1970, I turned 14, and it felt like the world was on fire. Vietnam. Kent State. Hijackings. The Manson family trials. The deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. The Nixon White House. America’s nascent mis­trust of government. We were a wounded nation. Torn. Dispir­ited. Angry.

That summer was as rough for me personally as it was for the rest of the country. My mother had died in March, and I spent the season with my maternal grandparents at their apartment in Margate. We were a wounded family. Damaged. Grieving. Bickering.

But there were bright spots: I fell in love with walking on the beach. Feeling anxious and sad, I’d set out for three- or four-mile treks along the water. The glistening, lapping, crashing percussion of incoming waves soothed my soul; the ocean’s vastness reminded me that, in the scheme of things, my struggles were small, fleeting. The damp sand beneath my feet squished in a rhythm that connected me to the earth, kept me grounded, af­firmed that life would continue, that I would rebound — one slurping, soggy footstep at a time. I began to suspect that I could take a walk on the beach nearly every day of my life and never grow tired of it.

That summer, I enrolled in Algebra 1 at Atlantic City High School. (I hadn’t failed it in eighth grade; I wanted to get it out of the way so I could take Latin in ninth.) I realized that it was a mistake on the very first day of summer school, when I gazed out the classroom window and lost track of x and y as I watched people lug beach chairs, umbrellas, coolers, and canvas bags down Albany Avenue toward the beach.)

Mungo Jerry, Three Dog Night, Freda Payne, and the Jackson 5 provided that summer’s soundtrack. But my number one song was James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain”. I first heard it in August, on my transistor radio on the bus ride home from summer school. The lyrics hit me like a rollercoaster: “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain / I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end / I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend / But I always thought that I’d see you again…” Taylor’s voice came through that tiny radio, straight to this motherless child’s heart.

When the song ended, the most remarkable thing happened. The DJ said, “I’ve never done this before, but I’m gonna play that song again.” And he did. By the time it was over, I was as hooked on James Taylor as I was on taking walks on the beach.

Another remarkable thing happened on that bus. It was on my birthday, July 20. I boarded near the high school. The bus had made it through Atlan­tic City and Ventnor before I realized we were moving slowly…very slowly. I looked up, ahead of the bus, where I saw the backside of an elephant. This was the day they moved Lucy the Elephant from her long-time home where she’d long stood in a state of disrepair to a new lot, where she would be restored.

Sitting on that bus on my most miserable birthday so far, I knew I was witnessing history. Mark this moment, I told myself. I took in the sight of the large, decrepit elephant-hotel being hauled along two blocks of Atlantic Avenue, a court order having spared her from demolition only hours earlier.

The world was transforming. My life was a swirl of change, and so was Atlantic City. Social norms were shifting. No longer were men and women dressing up for the boardwalk at night. Hippies and bikers came to town. Visitors and residents muttered about the resort’s decline; they spoke wist­fully of the good old days. Suddenly, Long Beach Island, Stone Harbor, and Wildwood seemed cooler than Atlantic City.

And yet, those beach walks were my therapy. James Taylor – and soon Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – made mu­sic that lifted my spirit. “Been walking my mind to an easy time / My back turned towards the sun / Lord knows, when the cold wind blows / It’ll turn your head around…”

My head got turned around even­tually. Through therapy. Through a long-time meditation practice. Through writing. Through beach walks. Through moving to Boulder, Colorado, in 1978. Meeting the woman who would be­come my wife, with whom I’d return to Philadelphia and raise three children that we would take down the shore. Where I’d tell them stories of my own youth on the boardwalk, of the soft pretzel bakeries, shooting galleries, and bicycle-rental shops my family ran in the ’60s and ’70s.

Today, I live on the bay, across from Atlantic City. From my deck, I can see the top of Lucy the Elephant. I have had plenty of time to test my old theory: yes, indeed, I can take a walk on the beach nearly every day and never grow tired of it.

On the one hand, that roaring, foamy ocean and beach are constants. They were there long before my fifteenth summer, and they’ll be there long after I’m gone. Their constancy provides a healthy perspective. But on the other hand, while it’s the same ocean, it’s not the same water; while it’s the same beach, it’s not the same sand. Which begs the question: When a place exists in memory, is our recollection of it a faithful recreation, or are we coloring memory with hopes, dreams, and bits of other experiences? Can we ever really go home again, or is walking our minds to an easy time as close as we can get?

Walking on the beach by the water’s edge I have known the deepest sorrow and the most profound gratitude. I’ve experienced my gloomiest thoughts and I’ve come up with some of my best jokes. On a still day, a surprise breeze can draw me back to that long-ago bus ride down Atlantic Avenue. Everything was in a state of change the summer they moved Lucy. And it’s still changing, of course.

Maybe in our memories, place is not a location, but a safeguard; not an event, but an anchor; not a dwelling, but an idea to which we return, again and again. It feels like we’re revisiting something we knew a long time ago. But when we look deep, we understand that the places we remember – the boardwalks of our summers, the beaches of our childhoods, the thrumming waves in an ocean of time – are all really pieces of ourselves.