The traffic clogged at the foot of the Cape May Bridge screamed July 4th weekend. But it was the first Saturday in December.
When I was growing up in Cape May, the bridge would have been empty this late in the year—unless a wayward green fire engine from Green Creek had arrived late for the West Cape May Christmas parade.
But unlike then, my car was a minivan filled with six teenagers.
My 15-year-old twins Madeline and Elijah had each chosen two friends for the 89-mile-ride from Collingswood (where we live now) to Cape May. For me, a nostalgic dip into the waters of my childhood. For them, teenage bonding.
Destination: The 56th West Cape May parade, a year older than me as it turns out. Enlightened teens that wanted to share their Cape May history with friends.
Madeline and Elijah have their own memories of my hometown. Summer weekends and holiday visits—but most of all their absorption of my childhood in Cape May. Every corner has a story.
They are much more enlightened than my friends and I were at their age. I would have been possessed by hormones and angst that required me being distant from my mom at that point in my life.
But any nostalgic revelry was being suppressed by an invasion of out of towners. “Dammit, I have never seen so many shoobies in all my life,” I said.
I dropped off Madeline with her friends Julia and Lorlei. And they almost immediately got separated from Elijah and his friends Jeff and Sam. But it’s Cape May so we found each other pretty quickly after I deposited the minivan in a not-quite-legal spot.
The parade route was choked with onlookers. Certainly, not the local-only affair that I was used to from Cape May in the 80s.
But the parade itself still reeked of a 1950s Iowa postcard. Bands, fire engines and little girls from local dance troupes. And candy tossed to the kids that lined Washington Street.
The twins had been to the parade before, but there was something different this time with their friends along. They kept saying how great Cape May was—selling it like it was their hometown too.
Madeline and Elijah were prideful as they chaperoned their friends to the Fudge Kitchen and Cape May Peanut Butter Company.
They found their own dinner spot at Mario Pizza, a place where I had spent half my teen years. I felt my own tinge of pride as I watched them (at two different tables—after all they are siblings), as they munched down and pondered what to do next. Looking so adult.
Later, Jeff and Sam listened carefully as I stood in front of my childhood house at 314 Jefferson Street and told them stories about the dark spirit that lived in my attic. Elijah had a smile on his face as I waxed poetic. He had heard it before, but somehow it was different this time.
We all reunited at the minivan. The two friend groups spent most of the ride home doing DIY Karaoke together as Sam played songs on my phone for everyone. The choices were all from my era: “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Don’t Stop Believin’” and other songs that were literally on my record player when I was 15.
After all, the holidays don’t truly begin until then meets now.
ED. NOTE: Keith Forrest is a professor of communication at Atlantic Cape Community College. His late mother, Libby Demp Forrest Moore, wrote the Joyride column for this newspaper for 20 years.
