Summer’s End

I apologize for a blog post that sounds like a feminine hygiene product. But lately I’ve had that not-so-fresh feeling.

Two Tickets on That Coast City Bus

After the first three grim months of the quarantine, when the weather finally began to improve, and New York — where I live — succeeded in flattening the curve, summer came as a welcome relief.

Though many people we know had understandably already fled the city, my wife and daughter and I, like many others, had been riding it out at home out of necessity. That was a profound experience. But when the temperatures turned warm and school was out, we endeavored to get out of Brooklyn as much as we could, thanks to the kindness of family and friends.

(That alone speaks to White privilege. Even for people of modest means like us — freelancers who are always struggling financially, and whose livelihoods and professional future are in jeopardy — we were still able to avail ourselves of some luxuries that were otherwise beyond us, simply by virtue of the people we know.)

Mostly we went to the Jersey shore: Atlantic City, where Ferne, Philly girl that she is, had grown up spending her summers.

In the best of times AC is right out of the eponymous Springsteen song (“Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact”), junkies and hookers and…