Hello New Yorkers and fellow exiles! I've been revising some thoughts I put down this spring about going back to my high school job, and decided that giving it to you might make me leave it alone for once and for all. Longer than usual, but I think you'll like it (it's about you, after all. Sort of, anyway. It might mostly be about me. But I'll leave that open to debate).

Read me ramble under the cut:

I have spent my last four summers dressed in white. White polo, white shorts, white shoes, laying white court towels on green grass under white-and-green sun umbrellas. Sea Bright Lawn Tennis Club, if nothing else, has cracked color coordination. I’ve long labored to become the institution’s ideal employee, and now claim the following skills with confidence: mastery of Swiffer WetJet and Microsoft Excel 2003, intuitive talent for predicting Grand Slam champions, and Oscar-worthy ability to feign enthusiasm about members' latest trips to the Hamptons. I’ve also become attached to a number of small children, always equipped with tiny racquets and outfitted in the matching bleached tennis get-ups I’ve sold their parents. Last-minute sticker-and-crayon sessions, while we wait for mom to arrive, round out most weekday mornings. Fringe benefits include free ice tea and my as-yet-unused employee discount, not applicable to all skorts. The days are charted by a solitary analog clock, in our own personal temporal miracle, which soldiers boldly into the future—no matter how often reset—five minutes before the rest of Rumson, New Jersey.

My summer employer, like so many Extremely Old Establishments, has managed to retain its nineteenth-century charm largely through lack of central air conditioning. The sticky Monday-through-Friday eight-to-sixes are punctuated by a twelve o’clock lunch break that never comes too soon. My boss, an endlessly kind tennis pro with a thick Russian accent, sometimes watches with longing as I escape; she eats at 1:30. I take lunch on the club’s upper balcony, reading and wallowing gratefully in the occasional sea breeze. Out beyond our thirty courts is a drawbridge, always deadlocked at midday, which leads over an inlet to Ocean Avenue. Across the road, further still, are hot sand and cold water. I spend my half hour gazing out at the Atlantic, swatting bees, and sweating—outside this time—under the weight of ninety degree August humidity. Special circumstances have occasionally torn me away. Once, I stirred a Minute Maid pitcher while covering for a kitchen worker caught in beach traffic (the clubhouse manager persuaded me that no association on the National Register of Historic Places could deny its members post-match sips on the porch). Twice I overstepped my job description to make post office runs in exchange for under-the-table cash bonuses.

In general, though, I grab those thirty minutes and don’t let go. That my job is far from cerebral makes it no less tiring; in fact, its special brand of menial banality can be exceptionally frustrating. It may be that the club has always had a singular way of magnifying my mental state: the small sadnesses of a morning—socks unmatched, Check Engine lights on, texts unanswered—amount to so many heartbreaks when my boss decides it’s time for manual inventory. What was a rough start becomes nothing less than a thoroughly ruined day. But she assigns site maintenance, cloistered in the only office with a thermostat, and my birthday comes early. Good days, bad days, then summer’s through. But never, between balancing spreadsheets and trashing flat tennis balls, do I feel the familiar adrenaline rush of watching the 2 pull up at 96th from the windows of the 1 train. I don’t spend an hour watching art students sketch the ceiling at St. John the Divine, or close my eyes in the evening and inhale as rain hits hot pavement downtown. I don’t hang around on campus, sitting on the grass in little groups of diverse college kids, poised for the cover shot of next year’s student handbook. New York, New York: it’s hard to remember the things I hate about you when I’m sitting staring at a broken clock however many miles away. And the worst part—maybe the only part, the reason I wax wistful at all—is that this year I’m not coming back.