They sat in dusty shoeboxes in the basement or in the back of our mother's closet, those ancient, crumbling black and white Brownie snapshots and faded color Polaroids of us at the beach at three or four or five, faces scrunched up like frogs against the sun, wearing goggles or swimsuits that sagged like diapers, pail or plastic shovel in our hands, sitting crying in a flooded sandpit surrounding a miniature castle, screaming against the insult of the cold waves, or faces covered in cotton candy. And later, there we are framed in photos with the rest of the family, beside a gangling older brother wearing matching trunks, perhaps, or in stairstep with a gang of too-tanned little sisters in pink bathing suits from which bits of buttock indiscreetly protrude, or clutching a styrofoam surfboard with deathly pale Dad towering over us wearing a baseball cap, his nose covered in some white paste, down from the city for the weekend while Mom sits on a folding chair under a flapping Felliniesque beach umbrella sulking in a black bathing suit and a bathrobe. And then the photos taken by high school buddies: the surfboards for real now and the girls all staying at the Ramada Inn wearing floral bikinis and flirting for the camera. Here's one of the guys sleeping six to a room on sofa cushions at somebody's uncle's beach house, here's another of the 'brick wall' of empty beer bottles you made on the porch. And Lisa and Leslie and Lauren from 11th grade, one of them your first girlfriend maybe, your first kiss at dusk in front of the boardwalk and everything full of sand and grit and tasting of french fries and the sea.

And here's one of the sea, the sea, the beautiful sea. There you are on the dawn after Prom Night or your wedding, perhaps, on your honeymoon with Lisa or Leslie or Lauren or maybe somebody you met at college whose name begins with some other letter of the alphabet. From whom you are now divorced. Should have stuck with a letter you knew how to read, my old dude. Bride still wearing her dress, holding it up against the surf and spray, you with your tuxedo pants rolled up your calf, clutching a bottle of cheap Californian champagne. And later here she is looking pinched and cross in a sweatshirt and sunglasses and you looking like a dufus, like your dad, in fact, in a baseball cap and sunblock. That was the summer you shared a group house with her best friend and your best friend and everything went horribly wrong, the weather, your friend getting drunk and smashing your car, the food poisoning at the seafood restaurant, remember? "The Little Chill", you all called it after the film, but now you see the joke was a sort of frisson of foreknowledge of the deep freeze to come. The only happy photos are of someone's dog.

Ah, here's one with you and your second wife. Reading books, looking like retirees. Now you take your laptops along and check your iPhones compulsively for messages. Here's another of her sister and her husband outside the "Cultured Pearl", a restaurant specializing in nouvelle Japanese cuisine. This time you're the only one without food poisoning, because you weren't in the mood for crab (since you'd been one all week, your sister-in-law merrily quipped). And look, here's your wife in the same black one-piece your mom used to wear--and she's pregnant. It wasn't the food for her either, it turned out.

Now there's a stack of photos of the kids, all of which you took and are therefore subtracted from, wearing outsized beach towels and gigantic bathing suits that flop around their knees and greenish plastic necklaces that glow and sound like little sirens when they are whirled around in the dark. Here's your daughter with long blonde hair, looking like a starlet in her first bikini, and your boy, bronzed and sinewy and suddenly bigger than you. And here's another of the four of you, dressed in winter gear, dumping your mother's ashes near a pier in a small gale, taken with a digital camera. And here's a blurry one someone took of you while you did the dumping, frowning with concentration to make sure the ashes didn't blow right back in your faces like in some dumb TV show. "What were you thinking about, Dad?" your daughter asks you, holding up the photo when she's home for a visit, after dragging the shoebox out to show the family history to her six year old son, your first grand-kid.

"Of my next visit," you say, maybe. The last one.

I just got back from my latest--with a cracking great prostate infection that cast a pall on the whole two weeks. But even so, early June is not the time to go, not on the upper East Coast anyway; the water is freezing, the weather freakish and variable, and half the local stores--not the factory outlets, but the ones that depend on high school kids--were closed until graduation. The boardwalks were half-empty, staffed by bored, gossiping Polish and Russian kids who packed the ubiquitous Internet cafes at night, paying $5 an hour to text-message their girlfriends and boyfriends back home. It's a summer of hidden undercurrents: gas is $4 a gallon, people are cutting back on their expenses, renting cheaper apartments and motel rooms rather than big expensive houses, helicopters endlessly circle the waters looking for sharks. The stores that are open are curiously understocked and overpriced, as if in breathless anticipation of recession and inflation; LL Bean and the Sony Store offer nothing that can't be bought more cheaply online. Now, one would think, would be the time to clear the shelves--that, at least, was the first rule of retail I was taught, after the need for display lighting. But my greatest heartbreak was occasioned by book-buying. For decades, it's been as if the publishing houses have tilted a map of the country so that all the best cheap remaindered book bargains ended up at seaside towns, and I would save up a special book fund just for bingeing with; this year, however, dramatic cutbacks have caused a sea-change in the industry, and the principal bargain chain booksellers in the upper and mid-Atlantic look like ghost ships.

Several, like the "Atlantic Books" in Rehohoth Beach, DE, have actually moved into tinier quarters and eliminated most of their sale racks altogether. There used to be mountains of remaindered history books as well as recent novels in all their stores--now there only a few stray copies of Ann Coulter and "How Bush Destroyed America" or whatever the neo-political memoir genre is now called. The "Book Cellar" used to feature remainders direct from the UK, as well as treats like racks of discounted "Ospreys"--now all that remain are the Ospreys, at full price, alas.

Best book store: "Hooked on Books", Wildwood, NJ. Owned by a sardonic Irishman (just like in the UK TV series "Black Books"), this is one of the best-stocked used book shops on the East Coast. I discovered Allan Mallinson there this past week, and am greedily Googling to acquire the rest of the series.

Best ice cream: hands down, this honor goes to the celebrated "Springers" in Stone Harbor, NJ. Nothing beats farm-fresh New Jersey milk and cream, at least not in beach towns.

Best pizza: "Peace of Pizza", just down the street, where a bunch of old hippies have created a gourmet pizza paradise with weirdly distinctive toppings like "Macaroni and Cheese". Why is it that food tastes so much better in this swathe of Pennsylvania and Jersey surrounding Philly?

Best sand: Bethany Beach, DE. Not to compare anything up here to the Caribbean or "Emerald Coast" of Florida. This season, the undertow is full of shells and gravel, and the NJ beaches particularly looked muddy and occasionally dark with oil residue. Local authorities have obviously cut back on imported sand this year (without which none of these commercial beaches would long survive). But I look forward to a summer of your own reviews.

Happy motoring!