Aging Out of Memories

Bull's Head Creek was in Staten Island, New York,  Port Richmond, across the street from Pop's house where my Dad grew up.  I wasn't allowed to play in the creek because it was "swimming in leeches",  my Dad said. But Pop's insisted the leeches had "medicinal " use for all sorts of ailments. The murky creek ran through a wooded area that disappeared when the Verrazano Bridge was built. The leeches were gone, too. After that, a lot of things changed at Pop's house. What remained at Pop's house was the big kitchen table.  The big kitchen table was the centerpiece of the home where my Dad grew up. It's where my Grandma  made homemade ravioli and spaghetti sauce from tomatoes Pop grew in his backyard garden. Sunday dinners brought people from around the neighorhood to the table. Pop would go to the cellar and draw a bottle of wine from one of the huge barrels and sit down - "Salud!" I wasn't born nor live...

Little Beach is a small patch of sand cradled among scraggy rocks along the Marginal Way in Ogunquit, Maine, a resort village at the southern tip of the state. The Marginal Way is a path that wraps around the rocks and trees and seems to descend precipitously into the ocean; yet it guides visitors from Ogunquit to Perkins Cove, a fishing village dotted with artists' easles and boats that seem posed for a postcard. A quiet refuge from the umbrella-clad beach that extends several miles from Ogunquit to Welles, Little Beach is filled with sharp rocks, salt-bathed pebbles and water that chills the eyes at first glance. It is that cold. This is my memory of Little Beach, of course, forty years or so ago, when I was 10 and my Dad took me to the waterside in the morning while my Mom took an art lesson. I had my trusty float, a white blow-up raft adorned with turquoise blue designs and orange fish, equipped with a "see-through" panel to the sea below. Did I me...