What I Like About Being a Jersey Girl

Since I’ve been accused of picking on New Jersey, I promised I would write some nice things about my home state. Here are a dozen things I like:

1. Horseshoe crabs. What other place has a crab like this? This is the king daddy of crabs. They look like prehistoric helmets. They might scare you, but unlike regular crabs, they are really very gentle and I’ve never been bit or pinched by one even though I’ve carried hundreds of them to safety, back to the water, by that tail thingamajig they have.

2. Open-mindedness and tolerance. Which one depends on how you really feel about the person and the thing he does or is, but either way, you’re not going to get your ass up about someone who’s different than you. Gays don’t rattle us. Cross-dressers, transsexuals, transsexuals who are gay, racially-mixed families, people with Down syndrome, Parkinson’s disease or muscular dystrophy, turban-wearing Turkish next door neighbors, turkeys (as in idiots), go-go dancers, unwed mothers, fathers with custody, women who are never having children by choice, women bosses, Unitarians, Libertarians, Presbyterians, Wicca worshipers, tattooed freaks with pierced eyebrows and wooden disks in their earlobes, people who are better-looking than us and older women with younger men—none of it makes us blink an eye and any of them would be welcome to come home for dinner. Well, we’d try to avoid inviting the idiot. And maybe the chick who’s better-looking than us.

3. There’s a tavern on every corner. Not a bar. A tavern. The old kind, with a diamond-shaped window in the door, dusty red-and-white floor tiles and a jukebox with songs like, “Make the World Go Away,” “The Summer Wind,” and “Mack the Knife.” Some taverns of note include The Barrel Tavern in Jersey City, The Wagon Wheel in Keansburg, Backstadt’s in East Keansburg, The Cambridge Inn in Union Beach, and any American Legion or VFW hall whose bartender knows what a highball is and that has a shuffleboard machine.

4. The energy. Whenever I go up there, as soon as I get close, like the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I start to feel excited like I had too many cups of 24-hour diner coffee and I better hurry because I’m missing something. I used to feel the same way going over the George Washington Bridge or through the Lincoln Tunnel. Or when finding my seat at an Aerosmith concert. Or a peep show. There’s action up there. (Okay, I’m only kidding about the peep show.)

5. And that’s right. Diners. There are no diners down here. I miss French fries with mozzarella cheese and brown gravy at three in the morning in a diner with Greek decor, miniature jukeboxes attached to the wall over chrome napkin dispensers, and waitresses who call you hon and keep pouring the coffee whether you want it or not. You always want it.

6. Speaking of food, there’s no food like Jersey food but everyone knows that, don’t they? However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include it because it’s one of the things I miss the most. Jersey has real Italian food loaded with garlic, fresh parmesan cheese and tomato sauce, sometimes called gravy, that simmers all day with basil and oregano. Forget that slop down here that has too much sugar like watered-down ketchup. It’s almost as bad as jar sauce. In Jersey there’s real pizza and real subs (as opposed to the fake stuff down here), cannolis lightly dusted with powdered sugar hand-cranked out of an aluminum sifter, Napoleons, biscotti and anisette cookies all from the Italian bakery (those Italians again), jelly donuts, zeppolis and French fries with vinegar from the boardwalk, French bread, Italian bread, bagels, hard rolls, pork roll, pork roll-egg-and-cheese on a hard roll, salami with peppercorns in it, Philly cheese-steak, Sabrette hot dogs with red onions, fluke, and White Castle hamburgers. Need I say more?

7. Anything you want, you can get. A job. Drugs. Rolfed. Tickets to see Hannah Montana or Air Supply—whatever floats your boat. A midwife. A reiki instructor. A pizza delivered. A taxi. Flying lessons. Three-hundred dollar ostrich-skin purple boots with a chunky heel and pointy toe. Lemon zest. (Edited to add—skip what I said about the drugs—this is supposed to be good stuff about Jersey. In fact, disregard the Hannah Montana mention too—no offense Kelly.)

8. Garage Sales. It’s garage sale heaven. Not because there are so many antiques up there. The country with its old farmhouses has the corner on that. No, it’s not the quality of the loot you can find but the quantity. It’s a numbers game. On any given weekend, weather permitting, many of the people who live in the one hundred-and-something matching houses in the new development down the road called Evergreen Estates or Three Oaks Manor, whatever, inspired by shows on HGTV, get the same idea—get rid of the junk. I furnished my whole house on modern garage sale when I was living in Jersey due to the invention of closet organizers alone. Check out my 1940s yellow kitchen table with chrome legs that I got for twenty bucks, Kelly’s red cowboy boots and the dual VCR you can use to make illegal copies of rented videos.



9. The people are good-looking. They’re slim, attractive and up-to-date. I don’t know if it’s the expensive haircuts, nail salon appointments, access to malls or what, but they’re slick like the display in a storefront window. Heck, I just found out what a Coach bag was, never mind carrying one. Jen would probably reprimand me for this too; accuse me of caring too much about what’s on the outside of a person. But it’s not true. Because pretentiousness and vanity is also one of the things I hate. It’s a love hate relationship. Here’s my position about our outer packaging—I’m always going to be a platinum blonde but I’m never going to get a face lift. There’s a fine line…Well, unless I run into big bucks, like hit the lottery or something.

10. People are educated about their animals up there. All dogs and cats get fixed. I hadn’t seen testicles for so long that I forgot they existed on the canine variety until I moved down here. When I spotted my first pair, the hound’s junk was swinging to and fro for everyone to see and I thought I was back in the caveman days. I might as well have been looking at two heads and not two balls, that’s how weird it was. And red-necky. But not in a good way red-necky.

11. This is cliché but I have to include the boardwalk. Especially the Keansburg Boardwalk. It doesn’t really have boards but it has seagulls, rock candy, and plastic buckets and shovels and rubber flip-flops for sale in the variety store on the corner. Clicking, ticking wheels lure you to games of chance where you can bet on names like Ike, Hal or Mom and win Sponge Bob Square Pants pillows and pictures of the New York skyline, with or without the twin towers, in shiny brass frames. There is Madam Marie who recently passed away in her nineties, God rest her soul, and who scammed, uh, removed the hex from my friend for a mere two-hundred dollars and who was immortalized by Bruce Springsteen along with a girl named Sandy on his Greetings From Asbury Park album. There are bumper cars with greasy rods that come out of the back and skim the ceiling causing sparks and making nervous children worry about electrocution, the Tilt-A-Whirl, skeeball, water gun games which I always win, and the dreaded spook-house. And when you get hungry, you can go and have a sausage-and-peppers sandwich and freshly squeezed lemonade in a wax cup.



12. The people up there tell it like it is. (Hence, the shameless mention of dog balls.) If you ask me, it’s better than pussyfooting around or being polite to a person’s face and then gossiping all over town about them the minute they turn their back. Or whispering about the unmentionables when what they should be embarrassed about is the fact that the dog even has them in the first place! In Jersey, they’ll tell you. Oh yeah. And if you don’t like it, too bad. Keep it up and you might get the middle finger.

The Pony Hunt

We’re on the pony hunt again. Basically, we’ve been pony hunting since Kelly grew out of her miniature horse, Minnie, when she was about six-years-old. We took a break when I finally let her get on Doc, and she rode the big guy around for a while, but now that he’s ready to retire, we have to look again.

It’s almost impossible to find a bombproof pony if you’re not rich. And even if you are rich, they’re still hard to come by. Some people get them because they’re lucky they’re in a family who has one and he gets passed around from kid to kid. Ponies live a long time and sometimes the pony goes full circle and winds up being both a mother’s and her child’s first horse. They won’t part with him. They keep him for themselves, selfish things that they are. The rest of us have to find one the hard way.

Getting a good pony is like hitting the lottery. Which is the reason most people end up putting their kids on full-size horses like Doc. There’s nothing inherently wrong with ponies, per se, that makes them hard to find. Nothing bad is bred into them that’s not the same as what we put into horses. It’s just that ponies, like children, live what they learn. And they learn most everything from the children themselves. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out it’s the sticky-fingered, knotty-haired, tantrum-taking riders who are the cause of the ponies’ bad reputation. Ponies are being piloted by little people who haven’t even finished growing and haven’t mastered the basics like patience, responsibility and self-control. Ponies have to tolerate little people who give them a whack one minute and a carrot the next—for the very same behavior. It’s no wonder they pick up some bad habits.

Plus, ponies are too little for most adults to train. A person who has a pony that’s too small for an adult to break, has to be satisfied with some line-driving and the bare minimum of amateur under-saddle work—if they can find a teenager to get on. So whatever ponies know comes from kids who don’t know much either. On top of that, ponies think they’re bigger than they are. They have big egos and a bigger nerve. But I was determined to find one.

You might be wondering why I don’t just buy another full-size horse. And you wouldn’t be alone. Ponies are harder to handle but they’re also easier to handle. You can just grab a pony from the pasture, throw a bridle on, or even a halter, and climb on up. You don’t need a saddle. Climb up, climb over, slip off the back end, slide off the other side. You can even mount a pony from the rear end. Just position him on a nice chunk of lawn, get a good running start and haul yourself up.

Ponies are the type that you can take right up to the back door and ask what’s for supper while you’re still up there. Some people have even taken them into the house but being the clean freak that I am, I require all of our equine to stay out of doors, funny or not. Ponies can be ridden all over the place and nothing fazes them. Down the road, over the hills, to the neighbor’s house, in the creek. I’ve seen them in the back of pick-up trucks like dogs going hunting. I’ve seen pictures of them inside cars. They don’t mind getting their tails braided or bows put into their manes. They put up with costumed kids on Halloween, purple and pink War Paint on their faces and small dogs on their backs. Good ponies are fun.

But most of all, the reason I want one is I think Kelly will become more independent, and without independence, if every task requires me to get out there and help her or do it myself, she will never learn to ride really well. She can’t reach Doc’s head to put the bridle on herself. Standing on a box that tips over is dangerous. She can’t lift the saddle up high enough to get it on him herself. She can’t even reach his back to brush him.

And I always worry about that far fall. She’s a little girl and he’s a big horse. You fall when you’re first learning to ride. It’s a given like having fun is a given on the back of a horse. I fell a hundred times. But it was from a pony. It didn’t hurt that bad. I saw stars, got up, brushed myself off and got back on again. A little girl Kelly’s size falling from a big horse is like someone falling off a roof. It’s not pretty. So once again, I’m out looking for a good pony.

When we moved to our ranch in Oklahoma, I thought the pony hunt was going to be easy. The place is filled with horses. That’s all everyone does out there. They sell horse feed and cowboy hats in Wal-Mart. There were two saddle shops in town but no clothing stores for people. But it turned out all the kids in Oklahoma ride big horses. They’re practically born in the saddle and little kids ride before they can even walk. They strap them in the saddle if they can’t sit up. They use Velcro and Magic Seats. Big horses with smoke coming out of their noses and steam coming out of their ears, pawing to get going, raring to go, are nothing to the mothers out there. They just put their kids on, smack the horse on the rump on the way out and hope they come back by dinnertime. Ponies were a rare commodity out there. Who needed a short, sweet pony named Buttons when you could put your kid on a powerhouse named Buster or Nuclear Demon?

But we did manage to find our share over the years. There was the buckskin pony that looked like Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron, who nearly ripped my arm out of its socket when I reached for his halter. There was the one who had one foot in the grave, half an ear and who was blind in one eye (and who we had to retire almost as fast as we got him). There was the bucker, the kicker, the biter, the striker and the one who had a horse show phobia and went berserk, out of her mind, plumb loco and had a psychotic episode when we brought her to a show but was dead quiet at home. A Jekyll Hyde, if you will.

That’s about the time that I gave up and started letting Kelly ride the big guy Doc. And he’s been great. Doesn’t do a thing wrong. A real babysitter horse. But now he’s ready to retire and again, I have visions of something more Kelly’s size, something more like my first pony, Cherokee, a brown and white Paint who lived in the backyard next to the pool and a barbecue grill shaped like a flying saucer. He was very forgiving. My father fed him a ham sandwich one time (horses are vegetarians). I took kittens for a ride on his back and backed him across a rickety bridge with big spaces between the rotten wood slats to prove to my little girlfriends on their stubborn ponies that Cherokee would do it.

I rode him in the ocean where he did the doggie paddle and I laughed my head off; I rode him to Green Light Cemetery, the Keansburg Boardwalk, and to my first job in the next town where I tied him to the chain link fence while I babysat all day. I even rode him to school where I was picking up my friend, who got out an hour after I did—I stopped and got her pony first and led him behind Cherokee along a busy road to the school. Cars honked when they passed. Teenage boys hung out car windows and hollered. I waved. When the bell rang, my girlfriend ran outside and we went riding, galloping across the football field. I rode Cherokee all over the place.

And then he died. I’m 47-years-old but I still cry when I think about him.

I’m not trying to replace Cherokee. There will never be another Cherokee. I just want Kelly to have the fun and the freedom that I had. I know it’s possible. Because we have Minnie. (And as selfish as we are, we’re not parting with her.) She was Kelly’s first pony, sadly outgrown as they say in the ads for ponies-for-sale. I want another one just like her, only a little bigger. Bigger than Minnie and smaller than Doc. Something Kelly can hop on bareback and gallop across the fields. A pony she will love so much she will cry about him 31 years later.