Montauk Memories

2016-We’re in Montauk again to celebrate. It’s late June so this time it’s my wife’s birthday and Father’s Day. We leave the Grice house on Franklin Drive, flip flops flapping, beach accoutrements jangling. It’s early in the season so most of the summer people are still not out yet. It’s quiet, except for the sound of a nail gun close by, someone’s putting the tiles on a new roof. We cross Old Montauk Highway, skirt the highway on the black sidewalk and continue to a sandy path. I catch my breath when I see the ocean for the first time since last summer as we come through the dunes, this always reminds me of seeing the grass of Shea Stadium for the first time. I know Kira, my wife of 22 years, will want a spot close to the water; we find something just above the high tide line. I ascertain the wind direction, dig a hole for the umbrella and angle it just so. We set up beach chairs, mine in the shade, Kira’s in the sun. Sitting there, book in hand, looking out at a lone gull hovering, gliding  over the blue ocean, I breathe deeply of the salt air-peace. This is my, this is OUR Happy Place.

Sitting there glancing at a fishing boat on the horizon, oddly enough, my thoughts turn to my father, Jimmy Spinner Sr. It’s odd because he passed away in 1985 and as far as I know, he had never been to Montauk. I can tell you this, my old man loved Brooklyn but he loved the ocean and fishing more. Had my father ever visited Montauk, I can tell you, he never would have left.

If Montauk is The End this story begins at The Beginning, in Brooklyn.

My father was a carpenter by trade but a fisherman in his heart. I used to joke with my friends, who all seemed to love fishing with my father, that my dad could enjoy fishing in a puddle. I never visit my father’s grave site in Greenwood Cemetery because that’s not where he is. I commune with my father whenever I’m near the ocean. All that I know about the ocean, the beginnings of my love for the sea, started with my Pops. He loved the ocean, was drawn to it, and he nurtured that love in me too.   In the early 70’s, my father purchased a working man’s fishing boat; wood, worn, small cabin underneath, inboard motor. Jimmy Spinner Sr. was happiest rocking to the waves, sunburnt forearms holding a fishing pole, his son at his side, a cooler full of Schaefer and C&C Cola within easy reach.

We docked our boat in a marina behind Floyd’s (now Toys ‘R’ Us) on Flatbush Avenue. It was there I learned about: the push and pull of the tides, the prehistoric looking horseshoe crab and the molar-like barnacles growing on the pylons of the piers. My handsome, weathered father knew about buoys, knots, lures and bait…I was hooked.

Summer 1975, Dad takes me to see "Jaws" and my love for the ocean deepens. I devour every book I can find about sharks at our local libraries. As 8^th grade graduation from Immaculate Heart of Mary looms, my thoughts turn to studying the ocean. Glancing through the book of New York City High Schools I find that John Dewey offers Marine Biology. My fate is sealed. Freshman year I took Marine Biology with Lou Siegel and all of our science labs were at the beach. We’d take the train one stop to Stillwell Avenue and spend time measuring wave amplitudes and frequency, in Coney Island; or we’d examine the creatures in the tidal flats at Plumb Beach. By Advanced Marine Biology junior year, my knowledge, love and respect for the ocean swelled.

Senior year, 1981, I am at a keg party in Brighton Beach. We’re a large group of seniors sitting in a circle on the sand, waves crashing in the background, drinking beers when Steve Schiffman, a friend from homeroom walks over with a buddy. “Jim Spinner, meet Ian Grice, you guys will both be going to the University Buffalo in the fall."   Sometimes life comes down to a few moments. I mean, it’s not exactly Lennon meets McCartney but we became fast friends. And it’s the Grice family that introduces me to the Atlantic Ocean beyond Jamaica Bay…

 
Ian’s parents, Eddie and Maureen Grice, both teachers, rent a beach house every summer. By the time I was hanging with the Grices, they had narrowed in on the East End of Long Island. The Grice family loved to entertain, to eat and drink and talk with friends. Each summer we would learn about a new town and the local bars, restaurants and beaches of: East Hampton, South Hampton, Sag Harbor, Shelter Island. I loved them all. It was a fun, exciting, meandering journey but eventually the family  buys  a place in Montauk. Now I loved Shelter Island for its romance, the fact that everyone on SI made a special journey to get there, was romantic. Sag Harbor I loved for its Americana and the connection to John Steinbeck. I loved all the towns but when the Grices landed in Montauk, it was different. In the Hamptons, Sag Harbor, Shelter Island, I felt like a poseur in my Macy’s purchased madras shorts. Montauk felt like, home. I loved the working class feel of the town, bars like the Shagwong had real fisherman in them. I never liked the t-shirt slogan, “Montauk, A drinking town with a fishing problem.” It seemed crass to me but I understood right away Montauk’s real fisherman bona fides. One of the first things I thought was, my father would love this place. Sadly, right around the time I was graduating from college, my father passed. But Eddie and Maureen filled the void, continuing the work my father had started.

After college, Ian, my friends and I were a cliché, Wall Street nubes, taking the train out to the Hamptons for the weekend. Never did I laugh so much as we did in the bar car of the Montauk Cannonball, letting off steam after a long work week. I rarely drink Budweiser in a can but when I do it always reminds me of those weekend trips in the 80’s and 90’s.

Those days were golden, Jimmy Buffet providing the soundtrack as we were body-surfing, reading books on the beach, biking out to the lighthouse, taking an outdoor shower and dining on mussels marinara. What I remember most about those weekends was the conversation. The driving force was the matriarch, Ian’s Mom, Maureen Grice. Brooklyn Irish, (born Maureen Murphy) she was wise, educated, she taught me stuff about the East End, throughout our friendship,  I would go to her for answers to all of life’s questions. To this day I know the philosophy behind Occam’s Razor because of Maureen, she was my Google before Google.


Over the years, I got disillusioned with Wall Street, frustrated with my lack of personal fulfillment. One Saturday night, Coronas in hand, sitting on the dock overlooking Lake Montauk, Maureen says, “Jimmy, maybe you should teach? I think you would love it.”

The seed had been planted. With every walk along the beach, every hour sitting around a fire, every bike ride, I’m reflecting about my life. Eddie and Maureen keep watering the seed and I’m thinking, Maybe I should teach? Look at how happy Eddie and Maureen are. They’re both teachers and they can afford a summer rental every summer. So it was in Montauk that I found the answer to what I really wanted to do with my life.

Over the years, I had the good fortune to convince some beautiful, smart women to spend time with me. I always loved introducing these ladies to my second family, the Grices, and to the East End. Right around 1990, I’m dating a girl and it’s getting serious. I know in my heart that Kira is the one but... Sitting with Ian and Maureen on the deck, the sun beginning to set, I’m boasting, “Ah, we’re never getting married right Ian?” At which point Maureen holds court, “You know Jimmy” with the emphasis on Jimmy as she begins as if I am ridiculous, “if you are serious about this I’ll tell you something. At some point, you’ll cease to be interesting.” Hmmm, I took this two ways. First it was a compliment because Maureen, a tough judge of character, was admitting that I was in fact interesting. But if I lived the life of a bachelor, moving into my 30’s and beyond, that would cease to be the case. I thought about what I wanted out of life… once again, I found the answers, in Montauk. Kira and I got engaged on the beach. I knew she was the one when she “got” Montauk, when she loved it as much as I do.

So here I sit on a Montauk beach, Summer of 2016, my girl at my side, and I’m reflecting back on time spent on the East End. It’s so obvious that this is where I am supposed to be. Kira feels it too. My father taught me about the ocean.  A couple of teachers taught me about the East End of Long Island and it was in Montauk that I learned about what’s really important in life. I know that if my father had ever been to Montauk, he never would have left. My problem is, I have been there, and now I have to figure out a way to stay.

Meeting Ambivalence

It’s late Monday afternoon, our students have scampered noisily to the exits and the Woodbury Middle School teachers are cuing, zombie-like, or some of us frenetically, to our faculty meeting. The looming meeting, the first Monday of every month, makes these Mondays even harder, if that’s possible. Planning my school week as I take my reflective Sunday walk, the realization of, Oh we have a faculty meeting tomorrow weighs heavily on me as it does most of my colleagues I’m sure.  While walking I think about what we did at our last few meetings and think about how long the day will be and I think that we might be learning something interesting in the next meeting, and I get kind of excited.  Maybe the meeting will be interesting and make us better teachers. 

I am observer and participant at these meetings. I feel like I should hate meetings because they’re boring, too long, often pointless….but the truth is, I kind of like them.  I find myself dreading our meetings and looking forward to them.

In teaching, and in the corporate world, we are often insular, working alone, or in our small teams, so that when the whole staff gets together, it’s an exciting change in the routine. At these meetings, we see colleagues we used to work with who are now teaching other grade levels, or working on other teams. Maybe those colleagues transferred to another department? So in that way, each meeting is a reunion. Which is nice.

 

 

At a recent meeting I went to sit where I always sit, a very desirable seat for me, back of the room towards the window. As I put my stuff down, one of my colleagues says, “You can’t sit there, Elaine is sitting there.”  I glance theatrically at the seat, cheekily I say, “I don’t see Elaine here.” I plop my laptop bag down.  “Oh, she asked me to save her a seat.”  I cackle, “What are we in high school Lee? Saving seats?”  Now Lee and I are friends or I probably would have given up the seat. Lee says, “Okay. But you’re going to have to deal with Elaine.”  That doesn’t scare me enough to move my seat, besides, there are a number of open seats right around us.

Waiting for the meeting to start, my exchange with Lee has me thinking…of how we are creatures of habit. Have you noticed your colleagues all tend to sit in the same spots? It’s a lot like a classroom… you have your front of the room teacher-pleasers, middle of the room participants who might fly under the radar and the back of the room slouchers and cut-ups.   As you can probably figure, I’m a back of the room guy but I do participate, I’m not a slacker and I don’t work on all manner of other things. At this point, I probably should be moving towards the front of the room as I am becoming “more mature”  (and my family would say hard of hearing) but it doesn’t feel right. Old habits die hard, right?

As I’ve said, something in me is observer and participant. We hear our principal kick off the meeting: always organized, with an agenda, following whatever protocols the research says make for good meetings. We’re told what our challenge is for the day, given clear directions, told to reconnect with the whole staff at a fixed time in the future. After a few questions we break up into groups, sometimes by grade level or subject areas, sometimes at random.

Working in groups (that’s all the rage in teaching now so that’s what we seem to do at every meeting) I watch to see who will take a leadership role in our group and in the other groups. Sometimes I will grab the reins, other times I watch and see how everything plays out. For some reason now, I don’t want to appear too pushy and always take the lead; if it’s something I feel strongly about or a subject I don’t really care about or have any expertise in, I will adjust my role. Maybe one of my colleagues would be better suited to lead this particular group? Because teachers are autonomous in their classrooms, most teachers have no problem playing a leadership role. The dynamics of the group are fun to watch.  Most people are active participants.  Usually the content and the task are fairly benign so we hardly ever get emotional, rarely will we see people getting stubborn and sticking to their point of view. Finally, task completed, we’ve had a pleasant time and head back to meet with the entire staff. We know that eventually we will have to share our work with the whole group, so we hope we have something that is focused, intelligent and I am sure we are kind of looking to impress our peers a bit and please the boss too.

Back in the whole group setting, I think of other things I've noticed about meetings to like:

 
There’s always the person that asks a question they already know the answer to because they think it makes them look smart when it actually does the opposite. Often, this person will summarize aloud to show that they get it. “So what you’re saying is, we have to get the kids to sign out each and every time they leave the room, as a security measure?”  Yes, that’s exactly what I said, why did you feel the need to repeat it? 

Then there are the people who become just like the students they were ( I suppose that’s what I’m doing by sitting in the back and casting out the occasional wise crack) some give up easily, some are shy, some become ultra-serious type-A teacher pleasers. To them I feel like saying, take it easy, nobody’s going to grade this, the goal is for us to actually LEARN something here. 

There are also the people who are working on all manner of other things, just like our students. These slicksters think the person giving the presentation doesn’t know they are uploading grades to Powerschool or setting up their Fantasy team for the coming week. Not only are these people being disrespectful to the speaker, they are belittling the whole process. They are basically saying, I have better things to do, or I can give this meeting 31% of my brain, while the rest of you pay rapt attention, and that should be enough. At the end of the day, they’re really doing everything half-assed and being disrespectful in the process. I should add a disclaimer: I’m the biggest hypocrite because it’s okay if I’m off task;-) If  I’m bored at a meeting, if the discussion turns to a student I don’t have, or pertains to something that does not concern me, I might do exactly the off-task things I just mentioned. I know, I’m an awful person.

 
Every meeting has to have its class clowns. There’s a percentage of us, as soon as we find a captive audience, become Bill Murray-like.  I myself descend, or maybe ascend, to class-clown mode. My real goal for a staff meeting, is to find that one comment that will have them rolling in the aisles. It doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s the goal.  I want my other cut-up colleagues, the other class clowns in the room, to look at me with envy, their eyes saying, “Good one Spinner, I wish I had thought of that!” 

 

We have our stay under the radar people. People who come to every meeting and don’t participate at all, biding their time until the meeting is over.  Luckily we don’t have many of these. God, meetings must be really interminable for these people! Similarly, we have our day-dreamers, people who are tired and zoning out, but at the end of the day, we all need a little break. In a two hour meeting, we all zone out, we think about all manner of other things. I often see my colleagues looking off into the distance and wonder: What are they thinking about?  I have to admit it, I do daydream, it’s hard to pay attention for that long.  I have my go-to “games” to entertain myself.  The game I play the most is, If I was single, would I date…her?  I can’t help myself, I was doing the same thing in church and in school all those years ago. It’s kind of a fun game, you should try it some time. Or maybe you already play it?

Finally, you have the person at the meeting, when there’s two minutes left and everyone is packing up, stowing away pens, shutting down lap tops, wondering if they have time to stop at the supermarket, and this person decides (and it’s always  the same person) to ask ONE MORE QUESTION. I’m not a violent guy but I would think tarring and feathering might end this quest for attention.  I mean really? Don’t you see your colleagues are shot and ready to head out the door? Can’t you just wait and suck up to the teacher on your own time and not inconvenience the whole group? 

Alright, gotta go, looks like this meeting is wrapping up. Can’t wait until the next meeting. Or can I?

Especially in the Quietest Moments

Are you ever driving in your car or perusing the aisles of your local supermarket and this seemingly random, benign, memory pops up? Oddly, while you’re looking at the hundreds of kinds of orange juice available to you, your brain flashes to a time when you were sick and stayed home from school? That day, your mom brought home some Pine Brothers cough drops and a package of multi-colored modeling clay and you spent the day under a blanket, chewing candy-cough drops and crafting wee animals out of clay.  Maybe you’re driving in your car and you think of being on a family vacation in Pennsylvania. You recall a summer day when your group of friends are sitting on the field at Twin Willows Cabins in Beach Lake with a group of teenage girls. Some of the boys are tearing at the grass and one of the teenage girls says, "Don't do that, grass has feelings you know?"  So? Why do we remember these? I always wonder, because some memories that pop up are obvious as to why. You hear a song on the radio and it takes you back to a specific moment. A date makes you think of the birth of your son, or your little brother. Maybe a smell makes you think of Grandma’s spaghetti sauce? These moments, these memory connections are obvious but this piece is about those seemingly random moments. This piece is about memories that seem so simple, not turbo-charged, yet they keep nosing their heads to the surface. 

One of the best days I ever had at my old summer camp, YMCA Silver Lake, I spent mostly by myself.   That’s odd, because like so many of my friends at this bucolic place, camp was really about the people. YMCA Silver Lake memories are filled with Rec Hall dances, Dining Hall renditions of “Little Rabbit Fu-Fu,” staff nights out at Jolly’s Pizza and the Sparta Inn, counselor hunts, opening and closing campfires, trail rides up at ranch camp….But my first week at Silver Lake I spent quite a bit of time alone. 

Now for a city kid, raised on asphalt and concrete, the fields, trees, trails, lakes, streams and open skies of northern New Jersey had breath-taking appeal. What a relief to get out of the suffocating heat of the city. For years, the invitations of my friend Glenn Gruder, who was a lifelong Silver Lake devotee, fell on deaf ears.  I hesitated going to camp, fearing I would miss hanging out with my friends on my block. Once I got into the country, I never looked back. To this day, I avoid the
city in the summer at all costs. Unless I can guarantee it’s 80 degrees or less, I won’t go anywhere south of the GW bridge.  

I was never a camper at YMCA Silver Lake, for me, this was a summer job. So these memories are from my first Staff Week. Staff week: a week we work together to ready the camp for the arrival of the campers and a highlight of every summer. The entire staff bunked, males on one side, females on the other, in Lindell Lodge, right on the main field.  Lindell, during the high summer was lodging for the CIT’s. This was a symmetrical log cabin right out of the camp text book; creaky screen doors, sandy wood floors and matching stone fireplaces on both sides. Glen and I usually arrived early, he’s a punctual fellow, and by my first summer, 1980, Glen was a Senior Staff member. As each car pulls up the dirt road, we watch excitedly like puppies in the window: Who might this be? Will it be an old friend? Is it a new counselor? Check out the license plates, tell-tale signs on the car? 

We spend every staff week getting reacquainted with old friends, kindling new friendships, scoping out potential romantic interests and of course working on projects. What I would give to do another staff week! Projects were fun and rewarding, in that we were working together for a worthy cause. The Silver Lake staff, most of us, took pride in the place, we wanted the cabins and fences and waterfront to look nice for the campers and their parents.  Staff week was also about team building, so the Senior Staff would change the detail up and rotate groups of staff members to work on different projects throughout the first seven days.  This way we got to know everyone on the staff, we didn’t stay in our cliques or comfort zones of friends all week, a great idea. 

Occasionally, the powers that be, would give us underlings time to relax during staff week. We’d play softball, touch-football, basketball and one of my favorites, a full-camp circle on the field for Duck-Duck-Goose. Towards the end of the week, if we were in good shape, the Senior Staff would give us a few hours of free time to swim, boat or do whatever we wanted to do.  Usually, I’m a very social guy, usually. Sometimes I like to, my wife might say I need to, be by myself.  Considering how fond I am of these memories, how much they stand out from all of my early camp memories, Kira might have a point.

In the middle of that first staff week, the senior staff decided we were all working so hard, and the camp was in such good shape, that we could knock off from 2 o’clock until dinner. Figure there was about sixty to sixty five staff members all hootin’ and hollerin’ about having the afternoon off. Some people went out to eat, some headed out to do laundry, I put my bathing suit on and headed down to the water front with some new friends. After a quick dip to cool off, I decided that a bit of boating might be fun. Choices of boats were limited, we had row boats, row boats and more row boats. Off to the side we had maybe 2 or 3 of these little kayaks. The kayaks were small, plastic and red. I grabbed one of these “playaks” and headed out onto Silver Lake. Like a dog following a variety of scents, I just went, slowly, taking in the sights. I’d pick a spot, and head out to say, Snake Island. I loved how the kayak would cover some pretty good ground with each stroke. Even my 17 year old, Pink Panther arms, could really propel that little plastic boat. 

Now this was ALL new to me, I was exploring, discovering things, a great feeling. I skirted around the island, slowly, languidly; the only sounds the birds chirping, the wind rustling the leaves and my paddle cutting the water every few seconds. Stopping paddling, I’m glancing at the small wake I’m leaving, I’m looking, devouring, savoring. During that kayak ride I saw submerged rocks and logs, fish, turtles, birds. I loved being a part of nature, Tom Sawyer-like, as a dragon fly would light on the bow of the kayak, check me out for a few seconds, and deciding I was not all that interesting, take flight. From Snake Island I crossed over to what I now know is Winnebago Rock. From there I skimmed the side of the lake out to Director’s Cabin, continuing around the side and up towards the Ranch Tents, eventually making it out to this lily pad infested cove where again I
“discovered” this little wooden bridge.  It’s a day I cherish, a memory that keeps nosing to the surface. 

My water excursion was bookended with some discovery on foot, when we got another few hours off later in the week. On my second voyage, I headed off behind the lower Kybo (bathroom & shower building for you non-camp people) through the woods to another road and a riding ring for horseback riding. The one thing I knew I had to do different while I was gamboling on foot, was to keep track of where I had come from. As a 17 year old city kid, I had a reasonable fear of getting lost in the woods;  so I always made mental notes of landmarks and turns made.  As I headed up towards what I now know is Ranch Camp and the Upper Kybo via that back road, I’m taking little tangential hikes on the various paths and trails I see. At one point, and my Ranch friends will know this rock; I spied a huge rectangular rock on the left side of the trail, kind of like that big black spinning cube around St. Mark’s Place. This rock was calling me, Come my little city friend, test your wiles, see if you can climb to the top of me. Off the trail I go, picking my way through the brush for 35 yards. Walking around this RV-sized rock, with a nice flat platform up top, I was crunching through leaves and sticks, searching for the series of ledges, crevices and hand-holds I could use to get to the top. My brain lighted on a route, so off I go, hand-hold to hand-hold, foot by foot, grabbing, pushing, exerting to eventually reach the top of this ultra cool rock. Exhileration!  We never got to do that kind of stuff in the city. I stood on top of that rock, raised my hands in the air like Rocky, for no one in particular to see and basked in my accomplishment. For my remaining years at Silver Lake, every time I passed that rock with my campers in tow, each time I rode down the back road on a horse or drove up there in the camp station wagon, I glanced at that rock and was reminded of my day of exploring when I “discovered” that rock.  

So I’m thirty some odd years removed from that summer. Yet those memories keep popping up? Now that I live in Middlebury, CT and we spend a good deal of our time in the woods, on the trail, at the lake, I realize that this was always a part of me, it was always in my DNA. What other reason for those two memories to stand out so strongly from all the other memories I have? These trips of discovery, into the woods and fresh air, were all about discovering a love for nature. 

The whole trip was about discovery, about exploring, something I love to do to this day. That’s the best part about going to a new city, a new vacation spot, taking out the local map and looking for adventures. So of course now I have to ask, do you have tales of discovery from Silver Lake or another place? Or some seemingly simple memories that keep asking for your attention?