Memory Highway

Scenes from Summers Past - Part 2

Upstate New York 1962, 1963

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenville_(town),_New_York

My grandparents had an unfinished summer house north of Greenville. The house was secluded and covered the side of a hill---approximately 28 acres of rock ledge and bottom land. The area had many farms but also the resort hotels with wide lawns sprouting badminton nets, horseshoe pegs, and rectangles of clay or asphalt for playing shuffleboard. Mostly there were chairs: Rockers and straight backed wooden ones enclosing game tables on the long porches; metal chairs situated beneath maples, birches and elms that were often occupied with some of the fortunate members of the horde that had managed to make their exodus from New York City during the Dog Days of Summer. The more recent arrivals had complexions white as milk. They looked like aliens in the bright sunlight. They ate pastrami-on-rye sandwiches with kosher pickles and drank clear NEHI cream soda. Cousin Milton owned one of the small resort hotels.

My family would have a picnic table set up in the front yard, the house was unfinished, all framework inside and no steps into the front or side door. We used a step ladder. Ostensibly my father and uncle were up there to help my grandfather collect large flat stones from the fields or woods and then stack the stones into some crude steps before filling in with dirt or cement. A large amount of beer was normally consumed while engaged in this labor.

My grandmother’s and great aunt’s arms were large and white like dough---flabby, flaccid, the dewlaps of skin a pale rose, puckered in a few places like the freckled field of skin near the small pox vaccination. Owing to the large quantity of sweets my grandmother and aunt ingested, and the sheer size of their arms, those upper arms were perfect targets for mosquitoes---a heavenly field of loose, sugar-perfumed flesh  Each of their arms displayed numerous mosquito bites which my grandmother and great aunt had scratched until the pink bumps bled. Some of the bites were smothered in a dried plaster of baking soda or calamine lotion.

The lawn chairs had a plaid or tartan pattern on a plastic lattice that made up the seat and back, and there were always crinkled strands of that material unraveling from the edges of the straps. Occasionally one or two straps had snapped off the seat creating a gap in the lattice. Then, if someone whose butt was a size larger than bony happened to sit on the chair, one of two things would happen. Either there would be a comical bulge sagging through the bottom of the chair, or the gap would tear and continue to spread until someone’s butt burst through and they fell over and were stuck by the ass in the chair opening. The chairs were made of a cheap aluminum, and sometimes a frame would simply bend and break from wear or from a heavier person who did not sit in the chair correctly. The cheap aluminum frame would warp and buckle and ultimately collapse under the strain.

We had bologna and salami (Genoa with little chips of garlic) sandwiches and Hawaiian Punch and a Yoohoos and Friehofer’s crumb cake with custard filling or some éclairs spoiling in the summer afternoon heat, attracting legions of ants and hornets and flies. The women always used hairspray back then which the hornets were also intoxicatingly drawn to. I wasn't much interested in the woods at that time. There was no place to swim on my grandparents' property. I took a few walks and tried helping with collecting rocks to build stone steps, but mostly I hung out and drank Yoohoo and ate doughnuts with chocolate melting in the afternoon heat.

There were big plans for the wooded swampy property and house, but after the summer of 1964 my grandfather fell ill and died the following year, and the propety and house were put on hold for at least six years, until I returned with a caravan of friends in late August 1970 to spend a couple days of communing with nature, making huge campfires, playing period Woodstock Generation music on a tape player, feasting on somewhat healthier food, and taking acid or mescaline trips and enjoying other substances as well as beer and wine in the splendor of the Catskill Mountains.