Book Excerpt

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My mom has spent the last 62 years coming back one week every summer, usually the third week in August, because of the generosity of the Reece and Stefano family, who were neighbors in Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, and who’s grandfather had purchased that house in the 1940s.

My mom and dad honeymooned in Stone Harbor in the fall of 1975 in a condo around where Donna’s used to be. They brought my sister and I to Stone Harbor, renting one week in that same house, when I was eight and my sister was six in the summer of 1986.

For 40 years, my sister and I have spent one week every summer, usually the third week of August, walking three blocks to the 99th Street Beach of Stone Harbor, setting foot on its silky smooth, powdery gray sand, making drip castles in the shadows of the lifeguard stand and riding waves for hundreds of yards in the same Atlantic Ocean that first captured my mother’s soul in the summer of 1964.

For 20 summers, I’ve been bringing my family to Stone Harbor, riding our bike from 99th St. in Stone Harbor to 6th Street in Avalon and back, past 122nd St. to the parking lot of the Point, where we would collect seashells for hours, as the tides rolled in and out and the once-fickle Atlantic Ocean decided whether or not to unveil it’s twice-daily bounty as low tide rolled out at the Moon's request.

My son set foot on his first surfboard on 99th St., Beach in 2008, when my son was 18 months old, when a man named Crisman Jespersen, whom I had met when I was 16 years old back in the summer of 1993, was miraculously surfing the second summer my young son, Brennan, was visiting Stone Harbor. 

Cris, as he preferred to be called, had told me when we were kids, that he had gotten hit by three cars that summer biking with his surfboard to the beach from his grandparent’s little beach bungalow duplex off Sunset Drive from the Bayside of 99th Street. 

I couldn’t decide if he was the luckiest kid on Earth for surviving three car accidents that summer, or the unluckiest kid for being “doomed” by them in the first place. 

Cris was the one who revealed the secret that all Stone Harbor locals refer to families like mine: he called me a “Shoobie,” a word I heard for the first time in the summer of 1993, while we were buying popsicles from the shack on 100th Street Beach, flirting with the girls behind the counter. 

Ah, the summer pleasures of being young as a teenager for a week of freedom in the timeless splendor of Stone Harbor. 

A town frozen in time and space. Perfectly preserved. Where you can leave your beach chairs and boogie boards on the side lawn each night and sleep peacefully in the comfort that they will be there the next morning.

Where visitors wash the sand from their bathing suits each afternoon, adorn themselves in the sophisticated summer attire of a Philadelphian socialite for dinner, shop the streets of 96th and Hoy’s, its glorious Five and Dime, before standing with all the poor and huddled masses in line past the corner of Marabella’s for a homemade Springer’s ice cream cone born out of Prohibition.

My son is now a freshman at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and jokes that he is majoring in “surfing” and minoring in coastal engineering to preserve and restore historic waterfront homes, which are at risk of being lost to the sands, salt, wind, rain, oceans and currents of time.

After first setting foot on Cris’ surfboard in the summer of 2008, my son learned when he was older to surf every summer on the border of Avalon through the daily Stone Harbor Surf Camp put on by the Park’s and Rec Association at $25 for a one hour session, taught by local surfing legend, Chris Brockman, that maverick of a man, who looks just like Ben Stiller's long lost Hobbit, who summers in Stone Harbor and winters as a snowboard instructor at Aspen Snow Mass. For more than a decade, Brockman has been Bodhi to local Stone Harbor, Avalon and Seven Mile Island teens eager to surf their local Point Break and were born lucky enough to grow up surfing these beautiful shores.

Three generations of Stone Harbor summers, waiting in a car for hours every August to arrive in a never-ending ant line of traffic to drive onto the island past the Wetlands Institute on Saturday, being awakened Sunday morning by the bells of Saint Paul’s. We knew our penance for enjoying Stone Harbor that week in all of its splendor was sitting on those pews Sunday morning, kneeling for mass, listening to the homily, saying our prayers and getting communion, before grabbing our boogie boards, walking barefoot three blocks without stepping on one billion small stones, or burning our tootsies on black asphalt heated to the melting point of Vesuvius rock lava: all to get to the beach and prove that the soles of our feet were as tough and tender as my mother‘s heart.

My grandmother‘s favorite movie was “Gone with the Wind,” which came out on December 15, 1939. My grandmother, Nanny, took my mother to see it at the Verdi Theatre in Bell Vernon, Pennsylvania, when my mother, nicknamed “Twinkle” because she wanted to be a ballet dancer on her “twinkle toes,” was a little girl, along with her sister, nicknamed “Sparkle,” because her eyes shined so bright.

My mom’s greatest regret is that her mother, my Nanny, never made it to see the Ocean in Stone Harbor before her mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer in the summer of 1989 and died on December 15, 1989, on the 50th anniversary of her mother’s favorite film, “Gone with the Wind.” 

Every summer, my devout Catholic mother, “Twinkle,” has paid respect to her mother by dipping her mother’s sweater in the Atlantic Ocean on the last day of the third week in August, saying a prayer to her mother to apologize for never getting her mother to 99th St. Beach, to set foot upon its powdery gray sand, dipping her own “twinkle toes” in the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and setting her mother’s soul free. She finds comfort gazing out at the vastness of God’s glorious ocean, fully at peace in her mother’s permanent “Shelter Haven,” safe from the brewing storms of its rocky shoreline of the ovarian cancer that claimed her mother in the first place.

Stone Harbor is my mother’s “Tara,” but she doesn’t get her strength from its red clay, she gets her soul from its gray sand. Her strength from its rocky jetties. Her spirit from its 7-mile Shores. Her heart from its beating, close-knit community. Where, like a wooden bar in Boston, they say “Cheers,” because everyone knows your name.

Every winter, since 1989, I make sure I’m with my mother on December 15th, watch “Gone with the Wind,” for all four hours, including its Overture, Intermission and Ending, to honor her mother’s legacy, roll our eyes at Scarlett’s naivety, her unflinching resolve as the War of Northern Aggression breaches the southern comforts of Charleston, Atlanta and, yes, “Tara,” and are inspired by Scarlett’s declaration that “as God as my witness, [she] will never go hungry again” and that “tomorrow is another day.”

I made this pilgrimage to my mother‘s house on December 15, 2025, to watch that movie with my mother as I have for 35 winters. As I will again the third week in August on the 99th St. Beach for 36 summers, as my mother dips her mother’s sweater into the ocean, says a prayer for her mother, and apologizes for her deepest regret, because she thought, as we all do, that she had more time.

I've wanted to write this book about my mother since I was 10 years old. Because I loved listening to her stories as a kid. I still do now.

My mother was diagnosed with Caner last year. 

So God gave me a deadline to finish the book before her 77th Birthday in September.

And although we were blessed before Mother's Day weekend that she is in remission.

You never know how much time you have.

Carpe Diem.

Because according to my senior quote in my high school yearbook in 1995 

spoken by Kelsey Grammar as Dr. Frasier Crane in the series finale of Cheers: 

“Time moves by so fast. 

People move in and out of your lives. 

You must never miss an opportunity to tell these people 

how much they mean to you.”

So, to celebrate that she only needs medication, not chemo, I treated my "Twinkle" to Mother’s Day weekend at The Reeds in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, to visit her happiest place on Earth in the offseason and perhaps say goodbye to the little yellow house one last time ... if I’m not able to save it from a bulldozer the day after Labor Day on Tuesday, September 8th, 2026. 

She told me it was the first trip that we had taken together — just the two of us — since I was married 23 years ago. 

So, before my Mother’s birthday this year, I will finish and release my debut novel, called “Twinkle: A Stone Harbor Memoir at the Jersey Shore," 62 years in the making. The intention is to do an author signing for the debut of the book on Saturday, August 22nd, 2026, the last day of the third week in August when my Mom makes her annual pilgrimage to pay respects to her mother to wrap up our trip to Stone Harbor.

Which opens with a woman in the distance, bending over in the morning fog off 99th Street Beach in Stone Harbor, dipping her arm in the water, and the beach goers not understanding why, although they've seen her do this ritual for many years before.

The book will tell a story of a young girl, who visited Stone Harbor for the first time at 14 years old (a most magical age) in the summer of 1964 and its impact on her has led to a 62-year legacy for her and her children and her children’s children. 

The book will cover three sections across 24 chapters (because my mother is "Forever 24") and include color family photos, historical photos and paintings by renowned local artist, Stephanie DiMuzio, of Stephanie's Gift Shop on 97th and Third Avenue in Stone Harbor, whose breathtaking cover in the style of Vincent Van Gogh with a coastal flare all her own adorns the cover of our memoir.

Prologue

Chapters 1-7: Twinkle (1949-1975, with a focus on Stone Harbor) 

Chapters 8-15: Twinkle, Sam, Scott + Julie (1986-1999)

Chapters 16-23: In-Laws and Grandkids (2000-Present)

Epilogue

Postlogue

Spanning three generations, all because of the kindness and generosity of Muriel Reece, whose father had the foresight, grit and determination to purchase a tiny beach cottage on Seven-Mile Island on 259 99th Street, next to St. Paul’s Catholic Church back in the 1940s after the country’s worst economic turmoil of America’s Great Depression.

My mother’s light may soon go out. 

Or the Good Lord might keep her here on Earth a little longer. 

Only God knows how her story might end.

But no matter when my mother passes from this great Earth, the “Twinkle” of my mother’s toes and the “Sparkle” of her sister’s eyes will remain steadfast in the sky, as a lighthouse on its shores, guiding sailors and strangers, hopers and dreamers to its quiet gray shores.

For six decades, her light had brightened the skies of Stone Harbor’s darkest of nights, as a beacon in the distance, a weathered cottage on the horizon, a “Shelter Haven” from the storms of generations of the Shaw family and future generations of Stone Harbor “Shoobies” to come, dreaming to one day become S’locals or year-round residents and citizens of Stone Harbor, as their immigrant forefathers and foremothers once did in Ellis Island a generation before.

May my mother’s light always shine bright.

May her spirit light the darkest night.

May anyone who ever had an American Dream such as this.

Of one summer at the shore.

Blessed with 61 summers more.

May they shine

May they Sparkle.

May they Twinkle.

Evermore.