Maybe everything that dies someday comes back

Everybody likes a good second-chance story. Especially me.

Asbury Park is smack dab in the midst of its own second-chance story, and it might be a grand one.

I was drawn there yesterday because it was a beautiful summer day and only 60 or so miles away.

Oh, and I wanted to see the Clarence Clemons memorial at the Stone Pony.

When I first went to Asbury Park so many years ago, it was fading, but still vibrant. The boardwalk was teeming, the rides rusty but operating, parking was hard to come by on a summer weekend.

But the weeds were starting to sprout unattended between the holes on the boardwalk's miniature golf course.

Over the past 25 years of so, the weeds won out. The boardwalk died. The rides were dismantled and taken to the scrap-metal graveyard. Asbury Park, or at least my romanticized image of it, went away.

Fast forward to today. That tilt-a-whirl down on the south beach drag isn't back, but there are signs of life everywhere. Shops and restaurants on the boardwalk. A mini-water park. A miniature golf course. An open Madame Marie's. And people. Hundreds on the beach, many more at the boardwalk, so many that there were lines at several of the eateries.

I met an older couple having lunch (boardwalk fries and lemonade). He was drawn to my Carolina t-shirt. Turns out he played basketball for Dean Smith for a couple of years in the early 60s. They’ve retired to Ocean Grove, a stone's throw from the boardwalk. They were delighted by Asbury Park's revival, but puzzled at what I was doing on the boardwalk all alone.

Over the past quarter century, Asbury Park has felt, lonely, deserted, and without hope. Yesterday. most of the loneliness seem to be centered near the flowers, messages and candles left in memory of Clarence Clemons that lined the outer wall of the Stone Pony.

I spend several hours walking aimlessly up and down the boardwalk, wandering.

And wondering about the power, and the possibilities, of second chances.