After a few rounds of beers and a frantic resetting of the clock last night (Daylight Savings Time is a strange concept), I arose groggily this morning and headed out to my old neighborhood to shoot some pictures for my former roommate Ebin’s band. It was strange being back in Crown Heights — just riding the 4 train all the way back into Brooklyn brought on a whole host of memories of the two years I’d lived out there. I got out of the subway at Nostrand Avenue and walked across the wide expanse of Eastern Parkway, remembering the days I’d jogged along the malls, or the late night walks that ended at the local ice cream and fried chicken joint, the bare trees and sidewalks decorated with tattered plastic shopping bags, urban tumbleweed. A lot of the time I lived in Crown Heights, I’d wanted to leave — and later, I’d wanted just to move on from that huge and complicated part of my life. At the same time, though, it’s easy to romanticize the past. Places haunt me, especially places I’ve invested some time in. I often think that I’ll never forget the look or smell of a place — sometimes I think I’ll be forever tortured with the memory of that eternally damp grey industrial carpet that served as my bedroom floor for a while during my tenure at 687 Lincoln Place.

This love for places is probably part of the reason I’ve been in New York for so long, and it’s definitely what’s got me excited for yet another week-long trip to the New Jersey shore this summer. The house has been rented, calendars have been marked, and relatives have been alerted. It’s only April, and a chilly 40 degrees outside, but at least I have warm sand, outdoor showers and tofu shish-ke-babs with the family recipe barbecue sauce to look forward to. Crown Heights may not stay with me always, but the shore — with its ice cream cones, broken-in wooden decks, and the smell of salt in the air — the shore will.