By the time Saturday afternoon rolled around our 2024 beach vacation was at an end: house cleaned, last Long Beach Island breakfast consumed, farewells said, and car filled for the trip back to Brooklyn, the heat wave we’d been happy to miss, and normal life.
Heading up the Garden State Parkway, your correspondent was frankly weary. You’ve been there: thoughts wandering, eyelids heavy, brain feeling full of static so that bearing down on the task at hand is faintly painful. I was weary and it was going to get worse before the obvious remedy made it better.
I should stop, I thought. Which was good advice and the responsible thing to do. But we weren’t that far from home. We had things to do. And there wasn’t a good alternative. Emily was asleep in the passenger seat, head bent at an angle she’d complain about once fully awake again. The kid doesn’t know how to drive yet, and I doubted a helicopter zooming overhead would drop down a learner’s permit and an instructor. Nope, this one was on me.
I decided I’d stop at the Jon Bon Jovi rest area (yes it’s a real thing) if I wasn’t more awake by the time I approached it, and flipped over from a Spotify playlist to MLB Audio, as the Mets and Cubs were preparing to resume hostilities at Wrigley.
Ten minutes later, I was sharp and alert. The JBJ rest area went by without us, perhaps awaiting Tommy and Gina at the end of their long days spent at docks and/or diners. To them and all other weary prayer-livers, whoo wah oo wah oo wahooga.
What had changed? I was laser-focused on my irritation with Tylor Megill [1], who’d given us the full Tylor Megill Experience in a nightmarish first inning: nibbling and missing, nibbling and missing, until five runs were home and I wanted to jam a spork — made in whatever country — in my eye. Just like that, we’d gone from a laugher so nice [2] we had to recap it twice [3] to being the laughee and looking to Sunday for redemption.
Still, by the time it was mercifully over [4] I was home and alive, people and automobile intact. Thanks for that, Tylor, even if you can keep the rest.