Back in the 1980s, at Rutgers, I was the Jersey Shore kid. I was asked so many questions about it that I sometimes thought I was the only Jersey Shore kid.

My answers, however, were always so lame. I never had an exciting story to tell. What I had to offer was always more goofy than glamorous.

Ultimately, everybody probably thought I was the only Jersey Shore kid who was dull.

"You're from the Point Pleasant?" they'd say. "Do you surf?"

"Sure," I'd say. "Poorly."

"Wow, but, you live at the Shore," they'd say. "You must have a lot of money."

"Well, no," I said. "My father had to work as a bartender in the summer because he couldn't make enough as a principal."

"Oh...," they'd say. "I bet you're a great swimmer."

"Actually," I told them, "I took three swimming lessons at the River Avenue beach, and failed all three of them."

"Oh, OK."

"The teacher once got so frustrated with me that he picked me and threw me into the water..."

"OK, that's good...."

I'd try to spice it up. Yeah, we swam—at Sportsman Island in Brick, or in the Manasquan River at the end of River Avenue, because Jenkinson's was often just a little too crowded.

The sand was always a little too itchy.  When I got older, my stomach could never handle too much booze, so I sipped Budweisers and chugged sodas while I watched everyone around me get plowed at Martell's Tiki Bar.

Yeah, I worked at the beach. Only I was running rides on the boardwalk and wearing an ugly green shirt with food and grease stains; not OP shorts with a shirt from the Brave New World surfshop.

I had a tan, yeah, but not a sexy Tony Hawk tan. My tan was a shirt tan.

Yeah, I fished. Caught some fluke once in the Point Pleasant Canal. But my mother made me throw everything back. I guess you could say we "fished for sport."

The more I talked, the more you could see the disappointment sink into their faces. Girls would hang out in my room and ask these questions, all excited to hear me speak. Then they'd slink away when they found out I was, well, no more exciting than they were.

Isn't that just like some people, though? They just don't get it. What they didn't get is that what we lacked in wealth, we gained in the richness of life.

What they didn't get was that Point Pleasant Borough—or "Point Boro," as it's known—is like many other well-preserved towns in New Jersey. Sure, it doesn't have a glamour of a place like Hawaii or Florida. It's too cold between September and May to be a destination resort.

But I'd always choose it first. It's a place that, after many years away, you could still come back and call it your own.

It always was—and still is—a close-knit community, a town that cares about its football, its small businesses and its people. Point Boro is a town that has a main street—Bridge Avenue—that is really a patchwork of small strip malls. But it's simple, and everybody knows where everything is.

We had one high school, a middle school and two elementary schools, allowing many of us to grow together from kindergarten to high school graduation, and beyond.

The class leaders are now among the town's leaders, and they've carried that "Panther Pride" with them from the Student Council and National Honor Society to the Borough Council, Planning Board and the Chamber of Commerce.

My family's Barton Avenue house (see picture) was knocked down soon after my mother's death in 2003. But I guess I qualify as one of those people, too, who resisted temptation and stuck around, or came back after getting a taste of glamour that the rest of the world supposedly provides.

After years of reporting that brought me to places as far and disparate as Afghanistan, I'm excited to be back, and to have come full circle since my buddy, Bill Borden, and I were editors of our high school newspaper, The Panther Print, 25 years ago.

I'm the regional editor for Patch's Jersey Shore news, and I'm proud to be back here, and to have the capacity to bring news back to Point Pleasant Boro and Point Pleasant Beach in a way that, many would agree, hasn't been provided in a long time.

Over the past two decades, I thrived on breaking news stories and covering political scandals involving wayward governors and brazenly corrupt public officials.

I felt the sting and the pain that thousands - even millions - felt as I watched the World Trade Center lay in ruins back in 2001, and then later, when I saw the remains of the victims as the towers' parts and pieces were transported to the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island.

I appreciated the excitement of the reporting world, and I'll miss the glory of writing stories that could shake up an entire state. But I'm glad to be back here, in this understated paradise, where I hold my weekly staff meetings in Pat's Pizza on Route 88, and greet my school classmates who always, every Friday, stop by for a slice.

Growing up, we had the Boardwalk nearby. Yeah, we surfed. But much of that stuff happened in Point Beach, or "the Beach," the Point Pleasant with the ocean view.

What many didn't know, or didn't realize, is that you could have just as much fun slightly to the west, in the "Boro," just being kids.

You could have just as much fun sucking down 32-ounce "Big Gulps" of Coke at 7-Eleven on Bridge Avenue, skateboarding in the parking lots of those same strip malls and hanging out in a treehouse that was hidden in the thick patch of woods at the end of Dorsett Dock Road.

When we were young, many of our roads were dirt. Acres of land were covered with maple, cedar and pine trees, shadowing the swamps where the now-endangered "Pine Barrens Tree Frog" lived in peace, and with a buffer.

We enjoyed being with our families and reslished the idea that our town was so far removed from the troubled neighborhoods of the north.

A bunch of people wrote in our senior-year yearbooks, back in 1985, that they wanted to leave and live in Californa, Florida or someplace "cool." They wanted to get away from the place that, sure, had a beach, but was never really something they wanted, desired or dreamed for.

But many of them came back, or they never left, because they realized that the best place to live was the "Joisey" seashore town with the pizza joints, bait-and-tackle shops and the still-unpaved stretches of land that, in essence, never really changed.

My family lived in a Levittown ranch that, back in the 1970s, had a sesspool in the backyard bubbling every time the toilet flushed. That surely doesn't happen anymore, but the ranches are still there, blending in with the dwindling pine trees that once filled the area.

One of the biggest moments of my childhood, down on my Barton Avenue block, was when they brought in the sewer pipes so everybody could flush their toilet without a worry. But it was also cool for a kid to have these big, hulking cement tubes laying around, waiting to be sunk into the ground. You can do some pretty cool skateboard flips in those things.

One kid from my block would skate almost to the top, flip his board around, zip to the other side of the pipe and do it again. He zipped back and forth, like he was riding a skateboard in a swing, and attract a crowd of kids who would lay their boards on the street, sit on them and watch for hours on end

I'd tell this story to the Rutgers folks and they'd raise their eyebrows, and act like I grew up in the swamps of Mississippi.

No, I'd tell them. Sure, it wasn't Hawaii. It wasn't even Florida or California. But it was - and still is - paradise.