Jordan Kelley goes to Alaska

I was lucky to work on a project with Jordan Kelley, a veteran of the Iraq war. Jordan was very open about his experience with war and what it was like to have all those experiences in his head. For the better part of a year, every Wednesday afternoon after work, Jordan wove some achingly sad and beautiful stories of his Dickensian childhood, the desert, and the redemption of real bravery. I still carry with me the mental visage of Jordan, now a short timer, lying in his COMV, mapping out his journey home. Not ready to fit back into his old life, Jordan chose to drive to Alaska, getting a 6 month gig as a Park Ranger.

Paragon Park, Hull, Massachusetts (gone now)

Paragon Park was to the south shore of Massachusetts what Revere Beach was to the north shore in the 60’s and 70’s, a white trash beach with an amusement park attached. My sister Marianne loved Paragon Park and insisted on going there every year for her birthday. One year, I think I was around 7, we were getting ready to head out and I stepped on a tooth pick that was standing straight up out of the carpet. I don’t know how far it went into my foot but it was far enough that no one could pull it out. In my neighborhood it was a point of pride to have toughened your feet up to the point of leather as soon as school let out in early June, and that clearly wasn’t helping the situation. Marianne was screaming bloody murder that I better get the damn toothpick out of my foot or I would be sporting it on the Cyclone. We were going either way! That was our Marianne, long on empathy. Marylou makes an executive decision that included a trip to the emergency room. The toothpick was quickly dispensed with, my sister Paula passing out in the corner, and we were good to go.

Giza

When I was in 6^th grade at Proctor Elementary my favorite teacher was Miss Ford. Doomed to forever serve as my impossible visual archetype, Miss Ford was very glamorous in an uglygirl/sophisticated/Diana Vreeland sort of way. Roman nosed, reed thin and oddly well dressed, she drove a mustang convertible to school, Isadora Duncan scarves and perfume trailing behind her. She looked like the type of woman who chain smoked for sport. The poor woman probably went home to her cats, but in the midst of our girl crushes we only saw impossible glamour.

Miss Ford was passionate for travel and wanted her 6^th graders to think about their lives as world citizens. Not a commonly held view at the time. She was over the top crazy about her trips to Egypt and took us to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Egyptian collection. I don’t know about the boys in the class but the girls all wanted to be Miss Ford floating down the Nile in her Mustang convertible.

Abu Simbel, Egypt

Along the same ‘I want to be Miss Ford’ vein of thought we have Abu Simbel. Abu Simbel was the final resting place of Pharaoh Ramses II. Miss Ford told the class how in the 1960’s with the building of the Aswan High Dam the cultural leaders of the world got together and disassembled both temples. Abu Simbel was reconstructed on a cliff 200 feet above the original site. I couldn’t decide who I wanted to be more, Miss Ford, Pharaoh Ramses II, who warranted his own a big ass temple, or a cultural leader who literally got to move mountains.

Patmos, Greece

Who’s that writin’?

The Bill Davies Paddle Out, Long Sands Beach, York, Maine

After my friend Bill Davies died his friends celebrated is birthday on his beloved Long Sands Beach with a surfing competition and an old fashioned paddle out to spread his ashes.

Coronado Hotel, Del Mar, California

I love this great old hotel. I say if you are staying at The Coronado you get a ‘get out of jail free’ pass. Ditto for the Chateau Marmont.

Nelson Beach, Gloucester, Massachusetts

Every year on my birthday my mom and her husband Joe take Tim, Isabella and me to Woodman’s in Essex for fried clams and chowder. Afterwards my mother insists on this endless drive around Cape Ann for a mini version of ‘Lauren Gillette, this is your life’ complete with numerous signposts of my young life. My husband usually falls asleep, and my daughter looks at me like I owe her big time, but I kinda like it. So, in case my mother has neglected to tell you, Nelson Beach holds the unique distinction of being the locale of my first beach trip. She will also tell you it took 4 hours to pack up enough baby crap to get there and which we stayed half an hour because I was not in the mood for the beach. Oh yeah, in case she hasn’t told you, my bathing suit was orange with horizontal stripes.

Hana Highway, Hawaii

The road to Hana is a windy single lane road. It takes about 2 hours of hairpin turns to make it to the top. I felt seasick the whole way.

Fish Beach, Monhegan Island, Maine

It has been a bitch of a year and a half. People I care about keep on dying. Isabella brought this sand back from a long weekend trip with the Henderson-Brown’s to the magical Monhegan. R.I.P. Kevin Brown

Arches National Park, Utah

My husband Tim and his two brothers grew up on Long Island. Since his parents split up his mother wanted to make sure her boys had a positive male influence. To this end she enrolled them in WELMET camp each summer for a 6 week session, (the most famous WELMET Camp Alumni…..Howard Stern). All the boys loved camp which took a different form each year depending on your age. At 16, WELMET campers went cross country by bus. Arches National Park was a destination for the campers. My friend Christine went there with her family and brought back some sand to fill in the collection.

Big Sur, Pfeiffer Beach, California

I love living in the Northeast, Maine in particular. But during long stretches of winter I often fantasize that I am Joan Didion circa ’67, hiding behind big black shades, writing The White Album mid migraine, and driving along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Stanley Beach, Hong Kong

My dad hanging out with his posse in Hong Kong.

Baltic Sea, Mecklenburg, Germany

Mecklenburg was my mother–in-law Marcia’s maiden name. She was a Canadian from Montreal when she met and married my father-in-law and moved to New York. Originally the family hailed from Germany. Not too many Mecklenburgs left in the fatherland.

Park under the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California

I forget how old I was, maybe 12, my Dad took me on my first plane trip to San Francisco. I don’t know if it is just nostalgia but San Francisco is still my favorite American city.

Fenway Park, Boston, Massachusetts

Is there anyplace as magical as a night game at Fenway Park? Every birthday my daughter Isabella goes to a game at Fenway with her grandfather. She always asks one of the grounds keepers for some Fenway dirt to mark the occasion.

Harbor Beach, York, Maine

Our beach (Long Sands) is considered the red headed stepchild of Harbor Beach which is about a mile down the road. Their beach is so much groovier than ours. It is surrounded by the elite Reading Room and Cliff Walk. Even the public bathrooms are more Martha Stewart genteel. Long Sands is better for dogs and walking but surrounded by economy motel rooms, fat tourists in Bermuda shorts, and the mullet crowd. No need to feel self conscious on this beach, there will always be someone homelier and fatter sitting one beach chair over.

There is a family I see out walking the beach most summer mornings and I’m insane with love for them. First you notice the tall, skinny, dad with the 80’s hair band mullet, then the two young sons with shorter mullets in training, and finally one renegade child who apparently didn’t get the business in the front, party in the back, styling memo. Ah, the glorious white trashiness of it all. I love Long Sands Beach.

Coki Beach, St Thomas

Years ago my sister and I took a Thanksgiving cruise through the Virgin Islands with our dad. It was a horrible horrible horrible trip and St Thomas was the most horrible part of it.

Otis’s first yard, Pasadena, California

Otis is my friend Simone’s dog. He is a Rottweiler mix, with a big boxy head, very handsome and sweet. He lives a charmed life in South Berwick, Maine with Simone, her ex-husband Glen and a cat named Jizo. Before Otis moved to Maine he lived in Pasadena, California, tied to a tree by a family who had tired of him. Simone’s friend Shannon was a neighbor of Otis and convinced his family to let him move on down the road to Maine. This is dirt from Otis’s original yard.

Topaz Internment Camp, Abraham Utah

Have you ever seen Dorothea Lange’s Japanese Internment photo of the Mochida family? Not to overstate the obvious but man o man it is the definition of haunting. The Mochida kids are bagged and tagged like luggage, wearing the thousand yard stare of veterans. This sand is from outside the Mochida barrack at Topaz Internment Camp in Utah.

Red Dirt from Oklahoma, Abe’s Walkabout

I don’t have enough space here to tell you the whole story but I need to start with my strange fascination with anything ‘Dust Bowl’. I collect photography from the FSA and love the bare bone aesthetic of black and white sadness and loss. On my friend Abe’s cross country walkabout he dug up some Oklahoman red dirt into a beat up plastic Fanta bottle and carried it home for me. Izzy and I put a small amount into the sand collection and the rest still sits in the Fanta bottle on my desk.

Short Sands Beach, York, Maine

Short Sands is one of my hometown beaches. It is overrun with tourists in the summer and abandoned in the winter. So empty that all the shops close completely down, putting ugly old stained sheets in the front windows to make their point. Well yeah, because until I saw the skanky sheets I really hadn’t noticed that you were closed for the season. When Steven King’s ‘The Stand’ was being filmed they shot footage at the Funarama, (which is right on the beach) in the wintertime to show a post apocalyptic world.

Rockaway Beach, Long Island, New York

Ramones concert.

Scusset Beach, Sandwich, Massachusetts (The Cape)

Should be renamed Skin Cancer Beach, we would lie out till we fried.

Pat’s Big Send Off, Nashua Country Club, Nashua, New Hampshire

My friend Pat Mandravelis passed away this year after a long battle with Crohns. One of Pat’s last wishes was that after her death there would be a big send off party for her at the Nashua Country Club. She ordered that there would be a minimum of crying, all our time was to be occupied with the superlatives pointed in her general direction. Pat always got her way, and this time was not different. As I have had to do way too often, leaving the memorial, I swiped some sand. R.I.P Pat Mandravelis

Saudi Arabia

I have a photograph of my father in his MP uniform on some tarmac in Saudi Arabia. Well prepared by his Army tour, MP Phil would come home to a job as a store detective at Sears.

Narragansett Pier, Narragansett, Rhode Island

When times were good the Rotman family had a summer house on Narragansett Pier. When times were bad they didn’t. Stanley’s (my father-in-law) father was a gambler and rumrunner so it was always a crap shoot which way it would go.

Nazareth, Israel

Knowing my fascination with anything biblical (except, of course, the Bible itself,) my friend Jody brought this sand back from Nazareth.

Pasada Ararauna, Izzy’s Brazil Trip

Izzy loved her Brazil trip until she got home with an awful case of Salmonella that refused to go away. All the kids that came home with scabies thought she got off easy.

Dead Horse Beach, Salem, Massachusetts

When my step-sister Marianne was six her parents were busy getting a divorce so they sent her off to St. Josephs, a Catholic boarding school run by a French order of nuns. Not to overstate the obvious, but what? The place was a big, brick, lurking, monstrosity right out of the imagination of Steven King. Marianne remembers learning her prayers in French (charming) and lining up each morning for uniform inspection (twisted). All the six year old girls would kneel in a long line, showing that their uniform skirts were long enough to touch the floor. And good luck to you if it wasn’t. The nuns found sex lurking around every corner. Don’t ride your bike; you’ll lose your virginity. Don’t think impure thoughts, when you grow up Jesus won’t want to marry you. Well yeah, if you’re lucky.

40 Steps Beach, Nahant, Massachusetts

My Grandmother Elinor, who is 99, lost her mother to Leukemia when she was six years old. She and her brother Proctor (the Victorian names are the first clue that this wasn’t the most festive of crowds), would spend their summers with their maternal grandparents in a big, rambling, beach house on Nahant Beach #114 Willow Street. The house still stands. Nana remembers her bedroom overlooking the ocean, her grandfather’s electric car, the Irish girls, working for the family, fresh off the boat, and her grandmother’s kindness.

Montauk Beach, Montauk, New York

When he was a kid, once or twice a year, Tim’s dad would borrow a house and borrow a boat and take his three boys to Montauk.

Haystack

My daughter Isabella got a scholarship to Haystack, an artist colony in Deer Isle, Maine. You could pick from a number of different disciplines and Izzy picked blacksmithing. When Tim and I picked her up she looked like she had been shoved repeatedly down a chimney then kidnapped by bikers.

A big shout out to David and Jean Lincoln who fund this scholarship each year.

Swampscott Beach, Swampscott, Massachusetts

My stepsister’s mother, Marylou, had a mysterious Swedish friend named Erica, she drove a light metallic blue Cadillac Eldorado convertible, so roomy it deserved its own zip code, that car made you happy just to look at it. Although I don’t remember Erica ever speaking, on hot summer nights she would drive up and we would all pile in and take a drive with the top down. My stepsisters and I would be in the back seat, listening to WRKO, singing and choreographing our dance moves all the way to Swampscott Beach.

Deer Isle, Maine

How the hell do people who live here get out? My aching Jesus, it takes forever to get from one town to the next. What if you just want to get to the airport?

Chatham Bars Inn

My grandmother has tons of great B&W photos taken during the summers she worked at the Chatham Bars Inn to pay for tuition to Simmons College. It looks like the job came complete with a Ralph Lauren photo stylist. All the kids would live there for the summer, serving breakfast, lunch and diner with time off in between. I think my Aunt Sue and Uncle Steven worked there to pay for college as well.

Private Beach, Cape Neddick, Maine

The view that spelled divorce.

Ocho Rios, Jamaica

Tim’s mother sent us on a trip when I was pregnant with Isabella. I threw up the whole time. I hate Jamaica.

Yellow Bathing Suit Beach, Truro, Massachusetts

I was visiting my grandparents on the national seashore. I forget how old I was, but that whole summer I only wore that ugly yellow bathing suit (unfortunately I’m not kidding.) I don’t know what my problem was (I’m guessing it had something to do with finally having breasts) but I insisted on wearing it everyday. The family ultimately had to have a bathing suit intervention.

Hunt Hospital, Danvers, Massachusetts

What a God forsaken place, I can’t believe no one has come and shut this hell hole down. When I was in fourth or fifth grade my mother went into the hospital for minor surgery, and give or take a few reprieves, didn’t come home for the better part of two years. In those days children weren’t allowed to visit the patients and I spent a lot of time in the waiting room lighting red glass church candles. Eventually I went to live with my father and family on the South Shore. Mental note: I don’t care if it’s a hang nail; Mass General and The Brigham are only an hour away.

Horseneck Beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

When we were kids Martha Garrigan’s grandfather Stanley had a beach house on Horseneck Beach. We all loved Stanley and loved to visit. It was a no muss, no fuss house. The upstairs was dormitory style. He would later sell it to send the grandkids to college.

Lynn Beach, Lynn, Massachusetts

'Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. You don’t get out the way you went in.’

Marianne and Paula’s mom used to work for the phone company in Lynn. Sometimes we would go to Lynn Beach while she was at work for ½ the day and for the other ½ we would go to this big room in the phone company building where you would call anywhere for free. Doesn’t sound like much in 2010 but in the 1970’s it was huge. It used to cost a lot to make long distance calls. My sister Marianne alone could run up a $300 phone bill in a month calling her out of town friends. The three of us would get into that room and not leave for hours until we called everyone we ever met.

The Dead Sea

I thought my house sat on the lowest elevation this side of the 9^th ward but it turns out the Dead Sea holds that particular honor.

Town Beach, Sandwich, Massachusetts

We used to ride our bikes for miles along the Cape Cod Canal. It was completely flat for 9 miles. As kids we would go over the Sagamore and Bourne Bridges to Sandwich, seeing who could ride with no hands the longest.

Isabella Beach, Fishers Island, Long Island, New York

In 1943 my grandfather, Herbert Pinto, began his third posting with the Army at Fort Wright on Fishers Island in New York. My grandparents had 2 children at the time and the whole family was there for 2 years. Fishers Island is tiny, 2 miles long and ¾ of a mile across. It was during this posting that my grandfather would invent telescope sights using spider webs as additional cross hairs. The spiders contributing to the war effort were named Spitler and Spirohito.

Along the Thames, London

When my husband Tim was 8 his parents separated and his mother wasn’t able to cope. Tim’s Aunt Sonia in Montreal got a paper route (odd, I know but Sonia was a festival of odd) and saved up enough money to send her sister to England to visit with relatives for the greater part of the summer. Sonia came to New York to take care of the boys bringing her three with her.

Joanie’s Beach, Gloucester, Massachusetts

You need to pay a toll to incredibly skeevy looking locals, (more like modern trolls I you ask me), to drive down to Joanie’s house/beach.

Visiting Vietnam War Memorial, South Portland, Maine

Half the size but just as sad.

El – Bahri

When my daughter Isabella was in first grade she decided she was going to be an archeologist, living a glamorous life amongst the ruins of Ancient Egypt. One day she looked up at her Grampa Stanley and invited him along on her future digs. Overcome with emotion Stanley asked, ‘Why me?’ to which Izzy replied, ‘Well I’m going to have children, someone is going to have to take care of them and I’m going to be busy digging.’

The El-Bahri temple complex includes one of the most beautiful temples in Egypt, built for the Pharoah Hatchepsut, 15^th century BC. Situated on the west bank of the Nile, in a steep half circle of cliff, it guards the entrance to the Great Valley of the Kings.

Weirs Beach, Meredith, New Hampshire

While I was still living with my grandparents my aunt Susie flunked out of college and moved back home. When I wasn’t with my grandparents I was with my Aunt Susie. Her future in-laws had a vacation home in Meredith and she would take me there.

Readington Beach, Florida

After he and my mother divorced, my stepfather moved to Readington Beach, Florida, where apparently all you need to have to be considered an eligible bachelor, is the ability and willingness to drive at night.