Fire Island, 4th of July

This past weekend, my partner and I went to Cherry Grove with a group of friends including our two German house guests, a couple.  We packed up the essentials—towels, a blanket, beach umbrellas, a cooler with water bottles, and a change of clothes, and took the drive down the center of Long Island then south to the Sayville Ferry.

We arrived ahead of schedule, but the dock was packed.  July 4th.  The busiest beach day of the year.  This was not an inconvenience though.  It was the beginning of a very colorful day.  We lined up for the boat with a parade of men in drag, their female admirers like gals out on the town for a bachelorette party, and nearly as many teacup Yorkies, Maltese and Chihuahuas as people.

Across the Great South Bay on the ferry and through the boardwalk paths, we found a spot on the beach beside a group of young, short-haired Asian women set up in a screen tent eating picnic lunch with chopsticks.  The group laid out in front of us was harder to reconcile.  There was a handsome guy with silver hair and a British accent and his decades-younger daughter? girlfriend?  wife?  The young woman tended occasionally to a naked toddler tottering around, and there was a restless young man making frequent trips to the ocean in a diver’s body suit.  Then, there was an exceedingly well-behaved ink black French Bulldog.  Group inter-relationships were inscrutable except the man and the dog.  They spooned beneath a sun tent for most of the afternoon.

By the ocean, men squeal at the impact of frigid three foot waves.  Bare-chested women play Kadima and toss footballs with locker room banter.

Wondering how the scene looked through foreign eyes, I asked one German friend how he liked this beach.  He said:  “This is more hetero than I expected.”  I inferred his meaning.  He would’ve liked to see more naked men.

The beach is a patchwork of racial and gender affinities and those sewn together by style of dress—the bold bikini bearers, the naturalists, the boys who look forward all year to the season they can wear sarongs.

We are a quilt panel of middle class Gen X’ers, not quite men of a certain age but we talk the part.  We’re outraged by inflation.  We rant about celebrities.  We have back pains and a hundred hypochondrias.  We lapse into silence, gazing at our younger, fitter counterparts.  Youth is wasted on the young.

But we are coupled (some of us), with careers, and wise, or if not wise at least resilient.

We go on to dinner and then a few drinks at the club.  We’re back on an earlier ferry than we used to take, and there are no outrageous stories to talk about the next morning.  Instead, there is laundry, an early afternoon matinee and shopping at Century 21.

We have edged up closer to the Future.  If we choose to leave the party early, it’s because we’d rather forgo the hangovers.

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