Maggie, dear sweet Maggie: I pray that somehow you will find this and dismiss all else I have written here to take this one shining moment of us into your heart and cherish it as I do you. For we, you and I, have lived twice: One life for ourselves and one for our dreams.
Their deceptions were considerable enough to cause a lifetime of worry. But every lie somehow remained undiscovered long after that day in Ocean City passed and as the calendar rolled by those apprehensions faded, marriages remained intact allowing two people guiltless reflection on a moment in each other's arms for twenty four hours one late September.
Social media creates opportunities to connect and reconnect with friends, relations and acquaintances. This fact is obvious and ubiquitous to all who use them. Anyone can be found on the internet and social media provides the tool. But what it has done sometimes is put two people together, having never known each other, and created an opportunity to find that both should have met long ago in another time and another place. This makes the engine of their connection, the always-available vessel that is social media, a magical daily necessity.
For Maggie Killian and Len Bartlett such a stumbling into the life of the other occurred and was nurtured over a period of years. In Jersey you can live blocks away from someone and never know who they are. Such was the case in Maggie and Len's lives, two people who grew up mere towns from one another.
One hundred and fifty miles of beaches an hour away from anywhere in the state puts every Jersey girl "down the shore" eventually. Some hate it. But far and away there aren't many Jersey girls who don't have special memories of summers on the New Jersey coastline and Maggie, a north Jersey girl, found herself going "down the shore" every time she had the chance even if only for a day. What had begun in high school and college continued throughout her whole life only now: with a husband and children.
Len Bartlett grew up on the Bayshore; that stretch of coastal water on the Sandy Hook and Raritan Bay. Even though it is waterview, the Bayshore is not a wealthy location indeed. Most of the towns along the Raritan and Sandy Hook Bay began their history as clamming, fishing or NY Ferry stops for people going someplace else in New Jersey. He grew up middle class yet existed in the "richness" of the bayside, ocean and its dunes.
The "cove", Deal, Seabright and Asbury Park were places he surfed when Summer days started with perfect rights at dawn and ended evenings when the wind quit and the waves got glassy. It was all he did as a kid, yet even at 40 he could still find an excuse to throw the board in the car, drive fifteen minutes and ride waves when he heard they were good for he never left the sea he loved and lived there with his wife, two children, a dog and a view of the great blue Atlantic Ocean.
These were attributes Len and Maggie discovered about each other quickly being 'friends' on a forum as pictures of friends, family and places shared with hundreds of others like themselves were posted with written greetings, amusing occurrences and thoughts for all to see. Besides a whole new raft of friends Len and Maggie were finding certain experiences and feelings they shared in their lives that mirrored the other.
North Jersey beaches are completely different from south Jersey beaches. Hundreds of those beach towns have a life and pace all their own and for ninety days of Summer every year, Memorial Day to Labor Day, those beach communities are packed with tourists. Hotels, boarding houses, cottages and rentals make up all the income a property owner is going to see all year in three short months. The crowds are so big: it pays off.
But once the summer ends, as if on cue, on the last day of the Labor Day weekend these towns empty. What had been a mecca of youth and young families sees anyone of school age disappear. These towns hang on keeping the boardwalk stores open for warm fall weekends but predominantly those cottages close for "the season", hotels lower their rates, bars and restaurants go into off-season mode, parking meters need not be paid and even stoplights are switched to blinking yellow. To visit a shore town off-season is to have the whole place to oneself.
This drastic change is most obvious in Ocean City New Jersey: a place Len spent two summers as a teenager living at his parents beach house just before college, work and life made it impossible to do again. When he discovered Maggie had worked in OC at the same time it generated a constant stream of fascinating communication between them. Personal messages only they would understand from back in that day along with pictures gave them both a sense of reverie.
That summer had been one of their most fondly remembered: unassailable as the best one of their lives. In that particular beach town, in that special summer, in the vibrancy of endless possibilities; neither had known the other existed. That shared yet unshared summer of their youth caused Len and Aggie to became the best of online friends: friends who had never met.
It was in the spring when he started posting pictures of summer lifeguard stands on the sixty beaches in OC from the surfing beach at 1st Street to the last on 59th near the old pier. Finding many of them on line he started posting them to Maggie so as April moved into May, she was receiving a new picture of a different OC beach, their boats, its ubiquitous lifeguard stand, their warning flags and tourists on blankets in beach chairs or standing in the surf: beautiful lazy summer day pictures as a constant reminder to Maggie that Summer was coming. She loved it and Len through this contact became ever more enamored of this girl from his own state.
There are women who are beautiful. There are women who are sexy, witty, funny and interestingly attractive in their own way. But Maggie was lovely. In every picture he'd seen of her she was smiling. With her friends or husband or children and by herself: her curly blonde locks, her hazel eyes her polished exterior was always dominated by her wonderful smile. Len was fascinated by it. She was professional, confident and had a career of her own. He began to cherish her responses and comments to him which often could start and end his day.
Conversation he noted between the friends she chose to have online made it obvious she was happily married and proud of her family, yet was confident enough to have conversations with men without a burden of flirtation. These were Maggies attributes he accepted and respected yet both of them knew more about one another's personal lives than anyone reading their banter could have guessed.
And she was a Jersey Girl.
Anyone "searching" the definitive description of what a Jersey Girl really is will find offerings from proud women across the state:
"She's humble, but ambitious. She's independent, but family-oriented. She likes pizza, beer and lots of mascara, but don't think for a second that she's not sophisticated.
A Jersey Girl is one of the Garden State's most enduring icons- a readily identifiable personality, as much a part of America's cultural landscape as Frank Sinatra.
