Like so many nights before, I sat and listened to my friend Tom soliloquize at a local tavern. The pub had become our clubhouse during the past few summers. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tom was getting his mail delivered right to his favorite stool at the arc of the patinaed walnut bar.
On this mid-September evening, the place was empty. Almost everyone we knew was long gone with the summer crowds, off to the bustle of graduate school or commuting to the city from our little Jersey Shore town. I nursed a longneck Budweiser as Tom went over the details.
Our mutual friend’s father, Dave, was a mason and needed us as grunts for the day. We both had worked for him over the years and knew what was expected. We also knew the homeowner well and anticipated a fat, all-cash payday.
Looking back, the topmost reason I agreed to help was the promised boat ride that would come once the job was done.
It was one of those second-summer mornings, already warm as I stood with my foot on the bumper of the work truck, listening to the tick tick tick of the engine as it cooled. Within minutes, I was twisting up a batch of cement for the foundation, which was half completed, while Tom worked on Dave’s mise en place—his work setup that guaranteed a speedy workday.
There’s not much I remember about how the actual work went down. I do know that we completed the job a tad earlier than expected and that the homeowner brought us coffee and pastries during a mid-morning break. He laughed at us as we sat in a row on the foundation reading three different newspapers: The New York Times, New York Post and USA Today.
I cannot summon the ache in my bones that I probably felt after lifting and moving thousands of pounds of concrete, and I’d bet my hands were blistered and raw, as they had gone soft and were not callused with work. I can tell you this was the last time I was on a jobsite like this. Soon after, I relocated to my current hometown of Brooklyn, as my career started to get some traction.
What I do remember clearly is the boat ride and the company aboard. She was a Topaz 32 Express with a beamy, fighting lady yellow hull, a marlin tower, a pair of Cat 3126s and a big, teak-clad cockpit. The owner spent many days chasing tuna in the Hudson Canyon, about 90 miles from where we stood on her deck. On this evening, he sat in the pilot chair, chasing the sunset on the bay.
Tom smartly had thick Italian sandwiches delivered, and Dave’s favorite beer on ice in the boat’s fishbox. It was a perfect combination on the brine. We slowly motored toward Barnegat Inlet and laughed at the “remember when” conversations that all seemed to be about Tom or me as the object of ridicule.
At one point, the captain killed the power plants and pointed to the streaked skies. Well above our heads were untold thousands of snow geese, their one-syllable, high-pitched honks filling the air as they migrated from their Arctic breeding grounds, bound for the southern United States and Mexico. No one said a word in the several minutes it took the flock to fly over and disappear into the twilit southern sky.
We sat down when the Cats fired back up, with a lifetime memory in the wake.
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Passagemaker magazine.
