by Rachel Doherty

Created on: April 23, 2008

As we drive up the exit ramp the wide, hot blacktop of the New York State Thruway gives way to shady two lane county routes lined with quaint motels displaying vacancy signs out front. Every year this transition brings a wave of relief as shamrock shaped swimming pools and brightly colored deck chairs promised a relaxing week ahead. Okay, perhaps at sixteen I was finding the shamrocks painted along the middle of the road and the same old Irish entertainers a little hokey. Still, I couldn't help myself from smiling as I saw the sign for East Durham "a little bit of Ireland in the Catskills" as we made our way along Route 145 to Banta's Lake Motels and Efficiencies - our home for the next week.

I had so many memories in this place. Running around with my older brother and sisters, or rather running after them. They usually didn't want some little kid cramping their style while they hung out in the gameroom playing pool and listening to Fleetwood Mac on the jukebox. They thought they were so cool and so did I.

This year it was different. It was just me and my parents. Everyone else was either working or had moved out of state. Now I was the teenager who was too cool to hang out with my parents. As soon as we arrived I said I wanted to stretch my legs. What I really wanted to do was sneak a smoke and see if there were any other kids there. But it was quiet there. In fact, there were only a few units occupied in the whole place. I couldn't believe it. I was finally old enough to go hang out in the gameroom and there was no one to play pool with or to hear my awesome picks on the jukebox. This week was going to be a dud.

I returned to the cabin to face my sentence of a week with my parents playing Rummy 500 and Scrabble. I scrounged up enough quarters to use the payphone to call my one of my friends back home on Long Island. "This sucks," I told my sympathetic friend. "I can't wait to get the hell out of this dump." Even the slide for the swimming pool looked smaller and more faded than I remembered.

After much sighing and eyerolling, I did agree to play some card games with the folks. I also spent a lot of time by the pool reading magazines with my Walkman blasting my favorite cassettes. By midweek I was just starting to despair when I saw a van unloading a few units down. And miracle of miracles there was a girl there who looked about my age. I wasted no time introducing myself and sizing her up. Kathleen seemed really cool and she even told me that if I wanted to

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