Well, I am finally doing it. I am writing a book of my stories of lighthousing. I'm filling it with the usual Greg wit and humour. Maybe I'll get picked up by Penguin Putnam or Random House. Maybe I'll be rich and buy a lighthouse as a CF timeshare.
Anyway...I thought I'd share the raw, unedited first draft of the first page. Let me know what you think. Is it funny? Witty? Really stupid? Any input is encouraged, and if it's good, will give me an inflated ego to write the rest of the book with.
So...here goes.
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CHAPTER 1
GENESIS
OR, HOW IT ALL BEGAN
OR OR, THE BEGINNING OF THE END
YOU GET THE IDEA.
A 9-year-old boy and his mother pulled up to the St. Simon’s Island Lighthouse in Georgia in a white Chevy Suburban. They got out, locked the car, and headed up to the light. Little did either of them know that that one moment would be the beginning of a lifetime of lighthouses.
Okay, that sounded cheesy. Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Greg Fitzgerald, 15-year-old lighthouser extraordinaire. I have seen over 150 lights when I started writing this chapter in December 2004, and by the time I finish this book, I will probably have seen more. So there you go, a little time capsule.
Yeah, yeah, I was the 9-year-old in my sappy story. My family was staying at the Cloister Hotel on Sea Island, right next to St. Simons, to celebrate my grandparents’ 45th Anniversary. I was, in typical 9-year-old fashion, driving everyone crazy. My mom, in exasperation, decided to take me to the lighthouse. And I am all the better for it, to paraphrase Thoreau.
Okay, back to the story. So we got out of the car and headed to the light. We entered the keepers house in the hot Georgia August day, and toured the museum. Naďve me thought such things as “wow, they have a second-order Fresnel lens…that must mean it was the second one ever ordered!” We climbed the tower, and then went to any kid’s favorite part of anything…
THE GIFT SHOP.
This was the real beginning of the end. I got a huge, 1000 piece puzzle of about 80 US lighthouses. I made it my quest to see all of these lights. I figured, “wow, 80 lights, that’s a lot! I can never see that many in my life!” I mused this while sitting on our bed at the hotel.
The next day, we left Sea Island (well, everyone else checked out, I decided to join the Jeep train to go shelling…but that’s another story. I still have the room key to the now-torn-down Room 251 of the River House.), and all crammed into the Suburban, which smelled putridly of vomit after my cousin had done such about 9 months before while we were visiting them. Such a lovely scent to accompany you for 6 hours from Sea Island to Alpharetta.
We returned home to New Jersey. I put my puzzle together, and realized that there were two of these lights nearby my grandparents’ beach house in Spring Lake, NJ. I went down there later in the month, and we planned a trip to these two lights. My grandpa also said that there was a lighthouse in Sea Girt, “nothing much, just a house with a light on top.” Well, we had to see that too!
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