Flashback, summers and Suntan Lake

Where do lakes go when you grow up? I suppose they grow larger and clearer as you get older. And the times spent there grow from lazy afternoons to full summers half a lifetime ago.

It is as if those brief half-day visits to that far away lake take on a life of their own in the transition from a childhood memory to an adult’s memory of childhood.

Some 30-odd summers ago, the children on my dead-end street spent evenings playing Sputnik, a form of dodge-ball, or chasing the Mosquito Man through the sweet smelling cloud of DDT. On carefree summer days we explored the natural spring in the field near the pipeline beneath the power lines, we called them high-tension lines.

Summer TV was different then, you know. There were only a few channels and very few people owned expensive color TV sets. I grew up watching the Three Stooges, Our Gang, and the Bowery Boys or East Side Kids.

Most of these shows would be deemed too violent for today’s kids. We had Officer Joe Bolten who showed us the Three Stooges shorts and told us not to do that kind of stuff at home. And even though we knew all the dialogue and all the plots from all the shows because we’d seen them over and over and over again, we labored to watch them on our black and white sets.

Dad nearly disowned the Three Stooges and me. He got to the point where if I watched the Three Stooges one more time, he would have thrown me and the TV out of the second floor window.

Luckily for me, the grown-up guy next door, Benny, enjoyed the Stooges. He invited me to his house to watch the show everyday. It provided a half-hour of peace for my dad and Benny had someone other than his wife Rosie with whom to watch our favorite show. Benny was also known as Bruno, I don’t know why.

Dad and Benny were kids together in these same houses. They had been neighbors for over 40 years. Neighbors have a way of knowing the right thing to say. Benny’s parents spoke in Polish to my grandparents who only spoke Italian. The neighbor on the other side of Benny’s house only spoke Greek. Ironically, in the old neighborhood there were few misunderstandings.

Benny’s brother Mitch was Dad’s best friend. They had not only grown up together, but they both raced homing pigeons for all that time, too. Mitch’s wife Helen was Mom’s best friend. The guys had their boids, and the ladies had their bingo.

The guys would sit around drinking coffee, smoking unfiltered Camels or Lucky Strikes and relive memorable pigeon races. As friends with children would, the ladies would gab about what their pigeon-bingo orphans were up to lately.

The kids in the neighborhood had to sweat it out when one memorable day each summer, Mitch gave up his blue Chevy so Helen could drive Mom, the girls and me to a place a million miles away called Suntan Lake. It wasn’t an official summer without one day trip to Suntan Lake in Riverdale, New Jersey.

Helen and Mom sat up front and chatted all the way. The girls, my sister and Helen’s three girls, talked endlessly about anything. When we finally got there, Helen and Mom staked out a place under one of the few trees in the place.

The girls, Lulu, Patricia, Mary Ellen and Gloria were off wandering and set off to swim in the deep water. As the youngest, I hung out in the shallow end trying to find the water jets that fed the lake from the bottom. I let the stream blast through my toes and whatever toys I had with me.

Patricia was the most outgoing of all us kids. Before long she had checked everybody else at the lake. In short she knew just about everything about just about everybody who was there that day.

And, of course, they were all her friends. She came back to us and tried to convince my sister and me to say that we were her cousins, as if that official relationship could possibly make us any closer than we already were.

Nobody ever asked if we were cousins, but Patricia wanted us to say we were. She was always thinking of stuff we could do and people we could talk to and other things that mostly made the day trip to Sun Tan Lake zip past.

We piled the last dry towels on the Chevy’s seats and sat in our wet bathing suits for the endless ride home. All of us full of the joy of a beautiful summer day in the country, but all so much quieter.

Summer days are made of memories that last a lifetime. Those memories comfort and shield us from the depths of dark waters swirling in the reality of the rest of the year. It has been about 40 years since our last trip together to Sun Tan Lake, but this is the first summer Patricia is not here to share the memory.

Yet her perky, driving drum and bugle spirit and legendary giving of more than she ever had to give, her consistently touching the hearts around her, will be with us always and forever. If anyone asks, we’ll tell them we’re cousins from Sun Tan Lake.

Adapted from RAMBLING ROUND Inside and Outside at the Same Time
Copyright © 2002, 2011 by Anthony Buccino

A FATHER'S PLACE An Eclectic Collection
SISTER DRESSED ME FUNNY
RAMBLING ROUND Inside and Outside at the Same Time


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This was first published by Worrall Community Newspapers. 8.22.96

About the author: Anthony Buccino has written several collections about life and growing up in and around Belleville, New Jersey. He also created Old Belleville, a web site of local history. For more information, http://www.anthonybuccino.com/