Going East

It’s amazing to me how it takes 3 to 4 hours to get out to Long Island and less than 2 to get back. What’s even more amazing is, as I consider the number of cars crawling eastward, that there is even a square inch of unoccupied territory left on Long Island! But there is, and it is beautiful…once the traffic moves out of the way. It just seems that, with so many cars flowing eastward, eventually, some will have to be pushed off into the water.

We make the trek a few times a year, mostly for family occasions. Okay, exclusively for family occasions. In truth, those are the only things that could get me on the Long Island Expressway. The occasional invitation from a friend with a house in the Hamptons means a crossing on the Port Jeff ferry. (That’s a hint, friends.) Even on an overnight, vacation starts the minute the car chugs on to that boat and I relax on the deck. But the ferry doesn’t make sense for seeing relatives who are closer to New York than Montauk.

There’s an interesting dynamic that occurs when you only see people at special occasions. The daily growth, or wear and tear, unnoticed on a daily basis, becomes monumental change when seen only annually. It’s like a seedling you plant at your country house that you find has obliterated the sunshine when you return to the house the following year.  Children seem to morph into new people. You don’t have any context for the changes in their faces or their fashions or the fact that they are now a foot taller. The babies you knew and held are now adults with babies of their own. The kids you played with as kids are now grandparents and, oh my god, in some cases could be great-grandparents within a handful of years!

I knew only one of my great grandparents. We called him Little Zaide, partly because we already had a standard sized Zaide but mostly because he was the tiniest man I’d ever seen. He was in his 90s when he died but, to me, he looked like he was always in his 90s.  Now I look at my family and it occurs to me that my 66 year-old cousin has a 15-year-old grand-daughter who could, perhaps, follow in his footsteps, find the love of her life at an early age, marry and have a child by the age of 22. That’s just 7 years from now! That would make him a 73-year-old great grandfather! This math is making my head hurt.

As the years go on, the parties get bigger. There are more children I have trouble recognizing and fewer of the adults I cherished. I’ve gone from being the baby at the family gathering, crawling under tables and getting into trouble, to being the senior citizen in attendance, wanting to kiss the cheeks of children who’d rather be crawling under tables and getting into trouble. It’s like being chased down the Long Island Expressway by sleek sports cars, oversized SUVs and even more terrifying 18-wheelers. Older, slower cars must stay to the right. Eventually, and it will come, we will be pushed off the tip of the Island into the easternmost water.

(Alternate, more optimistic ending: I prefer to think we will relax in the rural beauty that is Eastern Long Island, with its beaches and open spaces, all the traffic behind us.)