One of TigerBlog's favorite Bruce Springsteen songs - which makes it one of his favorite songs by any artist - is the song "4th of July, Asbury Park."
The first word of the song is "Sandy," the name of the girl that the singer is hoping to spend his Fourth of July with on the Asbury Park boardwalk. It doesn't get much more Springsteen than that.
When TB hears the song, it takes him right to that boardwalk. Did you hear the cops finally busted Madam Marie? If you've been to the boardwalk in Asbury Park, you know immediately that the most famous line in the song refers to the fortune teller who operated out of a little white shack with an eyeball painted on the side.
The Sandy in the song is a Jersey Shore girl, one who is listening to the singer tell her how he's tired of "hanging in those dusty arcades, banging them pleasure machines; chasing the factory girls underneath the boardwalk."
Sandy, he tells her, "the Aurora is rising behind us. The pier lights our carnival life on the water." Love me tonight, he says, "and I promise I'll love you forever."
The song is from 1973, from the album "The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle." TigerBlog was a kid then, growing up not far from Asbury Park.
Even now, 40 years later and 1,000-plus times having heard it, TigerBlog is whisked immediately to the Jersey Shore when he hears it, taken back to a place with heart and character and toughness and color, a place with its unique sights, sounds, smells.
It's not a pristine place by any stretch, but it has something that those beaches don't. It has its own feel, and either you love it or you hate it, and if you're in the first group, there's no place quite like it; if you're in the second, then you're missing the whole point of the place.
A storm named, ironically enough, Sandy, came through here one year ago tonight and destroyed much of that same Jersey Shore. Asbury Park was hit hard by Sandy, though not nearly as hard as so many other areas a little further south, most notably Seaside Heights, and to the north, most notably the Rockaway beaches of Queens.
There are areas that still have not recovered, houses that will never be rebuilt, businesses that will never reopen.
A bit more inland, here in Princeton, the rain never hit that overwhelmingly, but the wind knocked out power, in some places for a month.
TigerBlog was relatively safe during the storm, though the only place he could find that had power was his office, where he slept for one night and where he went to charge his phone and laptop, which were his only sources of information and entertainment.
Work? Princeton was closed for three days, Monday through Wednesday. Shockingly, it reopened Thursday; most schools wouldn't be back until the following week.
The 2012 Ivy League Heptagonal cross country championships were held at Princeton's West Windsor Fields the weekend before the storm hit, with competition on a perfect autumn Saturday, when talk of the coming storm was just starting to dominate every conversation.
The 2011 Heps? Also at West Windsor Fields. This time, the story wasn't about the weather that was coming but the weather had already arrived, as the most significant snow fall of that entire winter came actually in the fall. It looks pretty now in the pictures from that day, but it made running at Heps treacherous - and destroyed the home weekend scheduled with Cornell.
This weekend's schedule is similar to what it was going to be two years ago, with football, field hockey, women's soccer, men's soccer and women's volleyball all hosting Cornell Saturday.
The day starts with the Heps cross country championships, which this year will be an incredible event, with multiple nationally ranked teams in both races.
It even includes women's hockey against Colgate, rather than Cornell.
In other words, Saturday is one of those ridiculously busy days around here, the kind that really make working in Ivy League athletics challenging and rewarding.
The weather forecast is for absolutely completely perfect conditions, sunny and the mid-60s. It may rain Friday, but it'll clear out long before the games start Saturday. Maybe the cross country course will be a bit muddy, but doesn't that make it better?
There is no forecast for a repeat of 2011's blizzard of 2012's superstorm.
The first made for some cool pictures.
The second is still being felt not far from here.
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