Beautiful George, beautiful.
The salt in the air is a lifeblood for me and Dottie. I don't miss a weekend from May until mid October.
The salt brings back only good memories and for me the earliest were of the old Captain Starn's in Absecon Inlet. This was in the waning years of old Atlantic City, circa 1965.
My father and I fished off the seawall on Clam Creek throughout the summer and we always ate lunch outside at Starn's with my mom.
There was a fenced lagoon that housed captive seals and they sold red checkered cardboard boats of fish chunks to feed them. It was the highlight of the day.
As I got older, we would still drive down there and look at the encroaching squalor and eventually we stopped going there.
On one of our later trips in 1969, we stopped at an animal shelter on the way home and adopted a boxer/great dane puppy that I had until I graduated college.
My father loved the ocean and took every chance he could to be near it, smell it and touch it.
He longed for a boat his entire life but always the saver, family provider and the planner for the rainy day that never came, he would never take the leap and buy a boat.
As I struggled to watch my raucous, physically strong and father develop Alzheimer's disease at 70 in 1989, I vowed to never let the pleasures of the ocean escape me.
I bought a boat in '91 and another in '95, both of which I still own. One for crabs and clams and one for near offshore.
My father was not physically able to go offshore with me by 1995 but I did have him out a few times in the backwater on the smaller boat.
He died in 1997, a withered shadow of his former gregarious being.
Don't take one minute on this earth for granted.
Thanks George for bringing me to these musings.
Scott
The salt in the air is a lifeblood for me and Dottie. I don't miss a weekend from May until mid October.
The salt brings back only good memories and for me the earliest were of the old Captain Starn's in Absecon Inlet. This was in the waning years of old Atlantic City, circa 1965.
My father and I fished off the seawall on Clam Creek throughout the summer and we always ate lunch outside at Starn's with my mom.
There was a fenced lagoon that housed captive seals and they sold red checkered cardboard boats of fish chunks to feed them. It was the highlight of the day.
As I got older, we would still drive down there and look at the encroaching squalor and eventually we stopped going there.
On one of our later trips in 1969, we stopped at an animal shelter on the way home and adopted a boxer/great dane puppy that I had until I graduated college.
My father loved the ocean and took every chance he could to be near it, smell it and touch it.
He longed for a boat his entire life but always the saver, family provider and the planner for the rainy day that never came, he would never take the leap and buy a boat.
As I struggled to watch my raucous, physically strong and father develop Alzheimer's disease at 70 in 1989, I vowed to never let the pleasures of the ocean escape me.
I bought a boat in '91 and another in '95, both of which I still own. One for crabs and clams and one for near offshore.
My father was not physically able to go offshore with me by 1995 but I did have him out a few times in the backwater on the smaller boat.
He died in 1997, a withered shadow of his former gregarious being.
Don't take one minute on this earth for granted.
Thanks George for bringing me to these musings.
Scott
