Jersey (Part Three),

because I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. So that was Friday night, where we all made our twenty dollar donations to the Church of Lady Luck (who was not in fact a lady that night). I did have a good run on a video poker machine, however - unlike most variations of video poker you find in a casino, this one dealt a simple hand of five card stud, giving the player an option to "double down" on the bet before the fifth and final card was shown. There's something about the simplicity of five card stud that appeals to me, so naturally I lingered, and for a while it looked like I was going to come out ahead before the laws of probability remembered who was boss and cleaned me out down to my last quarter.

Then we went home.

Saturday my wife, the baby, and I took to the back roads, driving more or less the whole coast of Southern Jersey, from the backwaters of the Delware Bay to the barrier beaches of Cape May, the Wildwoods, and Ocean City along scenic Ocean Drive, which leapfrogs from island to island over bridges literally from another century (one of them was out in fact, necessitating a cumbersome detour out to the mainland and back again in order to bypass one measly tidal creek; I was willing to attempt a Dukes of Hazzard-style jumping of the missing bridge span, but my wife reminded me that I was driving a Honda Accord and not the General Robert E. Lee, so I took the long way around). Despite the howling wind and the bitter cold, the Jersey Shore was surprisingly busy. The permanently Victorian-era resort of Cape May knows no "low" season nowadays, and the rest of the shore communities have increasing numbers of year round inhabitants, and with them all the accoutrements of civilized living that used to evaporate at the end of Labor Day weekend. Nevertheless it was much more empty than, say, in July, and we enjoyed a leisurely drive from town to town, across Pine Barrens, past sand dunes, and through salt marshes that seemed to go on forever. Lovely. We ate dinner at the legendary Mack and Manco's, which keeps one of its three pizza parlors along the Ocean City boardwalk open year-round and whose plain cheese pizza is a quasi-religious experience; then we caught what turned out to be a spectacular sunset along the beach from our vantage point on the Music Pier.

(A side note: I've always been fascinated by the Mack and Manco logo, which appears to place an apostrophe after the name Mack for no discernable reason. I remember this driving me mad as a child, although I didn't know quite why. Now I look at it and I still don't know what the hell is going on with it:

See what I mean? Is it an apostrophe? A mark of ellipsis? A smooth breathing mark? Help!)

In the evening we visited my grandpop Mario and got to see some of my cousins, nieces, and nephews - including the most recent addition to our clan, a four-month old niece named Gillian. Looking at her was a shock. Could my little Andriana have been like this, lying on her back and cooing and smiling but not much else, only three months ago? It boggles the mind. I can't imagine my daughter being anything other than who she is right now. Pictures of her as an infant look familiar and yet at the same time not familiar. Who is this tiny alien, I think to myself as I go through the myriad digital pictures on my laptop. How amazing that a creature that only knew how to eat, sleep, and shriek less than a year ago is now hammering out her own improvised tune with unrestrained glee on a toy piano, crawling and rolling around our living room floor, and busy absorbing the world around her, trying to make sense of what must have at first seemed an overload of sights and sounds and smells and sensations.

Moreover, it was fascinating to watch my daughter's reaction to her four-month-old cousin. She's so curious now, and what with two months of daycare under her belt she's learning to socialize as well. And it won't take much more for her to surpass her mother and her father in that regard! Watching the two interact on a blanket on my Pop-Pop's living room floor, however, made me think of an idea I had for a joke website: Ultimate Baby Fighting. Basically it was originally going to consist of baby pictures and a lot of make-believe stats - wins, losses, favorite moves - but now I'm wondering if you couldn't write it up as a rock-paper-scissors kind of game (a la Stickfight), with two cute baby icons rolling around on a mat trying to roundhouse each other in the head.

First one to cry loses.