"Sag Harbor" begins to reach back to toddler games, to happiness as a lost estate, as Benji confesses that his "long lost love" is a house -- the Sag house in which he spent his youngest summers.
Recalling the black-and-white television at the Sag house: "It took five minutes to wake up, making all sorts of frantic sounds, like you'd startled the people inside from their dozing. A white dot finally materialized in the middle of the screen. A white dot in a sea of blackness. The first star in the universe on the first day. It grew and spread and the sound came on and eventually the comedian hit his punch line, the weatherman told the future, the monster stepped out of the fog."
Walking through the empty Sag house with the girl who seems to remember the past there better than he does: "This was my old house where all the good things still lived even though we had moved on. Everything as it was. Even the boy, the one who always seemed happy. He had to be there. This is where he lived."
"I was nostalgic for everything big and small. Nostalgic for what never happened and nostalgic about what will be."
Concluding at the annual Azurest Memorial Day picnic and bonfire, "Sag Harbor" returns to the idea of replacements: "We were all there. It was where we mingled with who we had been and who we would be. Sharing space with our echoes out in the sun. The shy kid we used to be and were growing away from, the confident or hard-luck men we would become in our impending seasons, the elderly survivors we'd grow into if we were lucky, with gray stubble and green sun visors. The generations replacing and replenishing each other. Every summer this shifting over took place in small degrees as you moved closer to the person who was waiting for you to catch-up and dome younger version of yourself elbowed you out of the way."
Benji scans the crowd of kids for his replacement: "Where was my replacement then? . . . Probably the knock-kneed creature in the green mesh t-shirt, with the scabbed knees and the telltale messed-up Afro."
For all the continuity there is also change, as in the destructive party
crasher, Barry David, who taunts the little kids and' after the adults wander off, commandeers new garden furniture to throw on the bonfire. Like the BB gun incident, Barry David is an indicator of violent forces at the perimeter of childhood.
Memorial Day: "The next day we'd close up our houses, pulling in the lawn furniture, winding hoses around forearms in messy loops, leaning on faucets with all our might for that extra bit that meant peace of mind for nine months. School work, autumn. As if autumn was not already here. Nights we zipped jackets to the neck, and data gooseflesh popped on our legs as we tried to squeeze one more use out of shorts we'd never wear again."
Thinking of his past and future self, Benji reasons that the summer, however brief, has changed him: "I had to be a bit smarter. Just a little. Look at the way I was last Labor Day. An idiot! Fifteen looks at fourteen and says, That guy was an idiot. And fifteen looks at eight and says, That guy knew so little. Why can't fifteen and three-quarters look back at fifteen and a half and say, That guy didn't know anything. Because it was true."
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