As summer closes, the night chill and melancholy are in the air. We move toward autumn with some reluctance as memories of the glory days of summer begin to fade. So for a brief moment, let us turn about and grab what we can of our summer memories.
To serve as a guide for coping with such loss, Andrew Lloyd Webber composed the song “Memories” for the Broadway smash “Cats,” a song widely considered to be the most successful ever written for a musical. The song, performed by Elaine Paige, instructs the audience to “Let your memory lead you, open up enter in. If you find there the meaning of what happiness is, then a new life will begin.”
There are many examples of artists who have addressed the problem of loss. We can look to the other great Broadway smash, “Phantom of the Opera,” and its opening scene. As the curtain rises, we see an old man in a wheelchair at an auction of artifacts from the Paris Opera House. There is a toy monkey with cymbals atop a music box which plays the song “Masquerade” and the old man bids for it. As the play unfolds, we come to realize that this enchanted music box symbolizes the entire plot of the play where the ugliness and decaying life of the phantom gets transformed into something good and even magical.
Gustave Flaubert did the same thing with the enchanted stuffed parrot Loulou in his groundbreaking and novel “A Simple Heart,” which marked the beginning of modernism in literature by the way he was able to instill significance into the everyday. Flaubert described the pure goodness and the simple heart of Felicite, the maid, and her love of her stuffed parrot Loulou. In this case we have Flaubert using a stuffed parrot to symbolize all of the disappointments and lost love from Felicite’s past and how she somehow overcame it all. This symbol was so powerful that Julian Barnes wrote the award winning novel” Flaubert’s Parrot” about it.
But you don’t need to be Gustave Flaubert or Andrew Lloyd Webber to make your own magical symbols of lost times. All you need is a camera and a plan. So in an effort to find a lasting and worthwhile memory of my lost summer, I decided to take a trip to Fire Island with camera in hand.
An excursion to Fire Island conjures up identifications with Odysseus and a hero’s journey given the need to travel to a far-off place by boat. Indeed, my journey was only by ferry and we did not encounter any severe storms or one-eyed monsters, but nonetheless it did take some courage to embark on the journey.
We arrived at Sailors Haven and then traveled through the 1.5 miles of the ancient Sunken Forest where a well-maintained boardwalk takes you under a canopy of leaves as you pass between huge dunes, marshes and bays and get a glimpse of monarch butterflies and white-tailed deer.
Our walk finally took us to the sleepy hamlet of Cherry Grove with pretty little cottages hidden away under trees and we made our way to the Sand Castle Restaurant for lunch of oysters on the half shell as we overlooked the ocean and the waves.
If I had to choose, I would say the most enchanted symbol of Fire Island is the 1-½- mile boardwalk that winds through the Sunken Forest. Like Flaubert’s golden parrot and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stuffed monkey on the music box, the boardwalk is a man-made object that serves as a great comfort as we wind our way through the sand dunes and marshes.
The greats of literature have written about walking about on sidewalks. Virginia Woolf has written “Mrs. Dalloway,” “A Room of One’s Own” and the spectacular essay “Street Haunting,” all of which pay homage to walking about the city of London and encountering sights and sounds and experiences along the way. And wasn’t James Joyce’s “Ulysses” about Leopold Bloom’s strange wanderings along the streets of Dublin as he visited hotels, pubs, pharmacies and brothels?
Walking is one of the great simple pleasures of life and why the game of golf is so captivating. I am glad that someone was smart enough to build this 1-½-mile Fire Island boardwalk. Parts are built of natural wood, parts of concrete and parts composite and as you meander east you feel a quiet kind of happiness. Or as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s song went
“I can smile at the old days,
I was beautiful then.
I remember a time I knew what happiness was.
Let the memory live again.”
Summer comes and summer goes. Green trees, white clouds and blue skies give way to shades of gray. Youth comes, but youth must go. This is the way of the world, but at least we have our photos to jog memory and keep us warm as the winter comes our way. Say goodbye to Labor Day and say hello to Halloween. Boo hoo, hoo!
