As a child, time works quite differently than it does for adults. For instance, I explicitly remember the way I viewed the calendar year as a young girl. There was Halloween time, Christmas time, birthday time, lots of blank, colorless months of school time and then there was summer time. I didn’t call it or think of it as summer time. In my tiny, French-braided head, it was LBI Time.

I am not one of the blessed children born into a high-brow, old-money East Coast family, nor did I benefit from a large…