4. The Twilight Zone
We traveled to Sandy Pond not by car, but by time machine – set for 1930. There was indoor plumbing, but you couldn’t drink the tap water. We fetched it across the street, pumping it from a shared well, something I enjoyed doing –at least, for two weeks. Many years later my kids did the same, but only for the novelty. I had long since given up drinking from the well. When we left for the pond, we’d take a two-week supply of drinking water with us.

The first few times I went to Sandy Pond, starting in the mid-1940s, we kept our perishable food in an icebox. Going with my father to buy 25-pound chunks of ice became another vacation adventure, though for my parents it was merely a reminder of their childhoods and a reason to be grateful for the refrigerator they had at home.

Also impervious to change was the neaby village of Pulaski, which could have been a living history museum or a set for a remake of "Bonnie & Clyde." I noticed little difference in Pulaski from the time I was a child until the time my own children were teenagers. (A Providence Journal co-worker whose job as the newspaper's outdoor writer occasionally had him covering fishing on the Salmon River, which runs through Pulaski, said the area put him in mind of the Old West. Oh, people got around in trucks, not on horses, but, he said, "every truck there has a gun rack.")

EACH YEAR our extended family of uncles, aunts, cousins and the grandmother we called Nana returned to the same two Sandy Pond cottages. My parents, my younger sister and I stayed in the smaller cottage. It could sleep six, so we were joined by Nana and one of my cousins.

The bigger cottage had a kitchen, dining room and living room downstairs; upstairs were four small bedrooms with paper-thin walls. The first floor was at road level, a car-width off County Highway 15, which continued past the cottage and followed the pond shoreline south by southwest around a curve until it deadended at a small bridge which marked the start of the desert walk to the beach.

Both cottages were built on the side of the 20-foot slope from the road to the pond, but the smaller cottage, which also had an upstairs, was grounded at pond level; the larger cottage was two flights of stairs above the water. When the pond was roiled, the waves would lap against the small cottage. You’d look out the kitchen window and think you were on a boat. Look out that window too long and you could get sea sick.

Most of the cottages, as well as a small hotel, general store and a small marina, were lined up along a dirt road that intersected with County Highway 15 about 50 feet north of our cottages. That road went north by northeast, parallel to and a lot’s length from the pond shoreline. Over time the dirt turned black under the oil that was used to seal and maintain the road. The mixture of oil and dirt produced a pungent odor that could be bottled as The Scent of Sandy Pond. A perfect gift for Pondaholics – and stock car race drivers. Sure to evoke fond memories.

Among mine: Walking along that road to and from the general store to play Skiball, five cents a game. I’d leave the cottage with a pocketful of nickels and return an hour or so later to ask my mother for more.

A few years later the skiball game disappeared. So did the store. The odor, however, will linger until the dinosaurs return.

MY PARENTS seldom went out to eat. My father was an unusually fussy eater. His list of acceptable foods was short and simple. So simple that my mother was able to cater to her husband while fixing herself – and her children – completely different meals.

However, Sandy Pond was, after all, a vacation. Though she cooked dinner more nights than not, my mother had to take an occasional break from the tiny cottage kitchen that faced the afternoon sun. On good-weather days the kitchen became insufferably hot.

So for me Sandy Pond vacations were special partly because they were practically the only times we went to restaurants.

My favorite was what they used to call a roadhouse. It was at the far end of the dirt road, across from a place called the Hotel Comfort. The restaurant’s name escapes me. Another Pond veteran told me it was called Tot's Pavillion. Perhaps it was, but I think it might have had another name in the 1940s. I do recall walking through a narrow bar area to a backroom where there were two rows of booths separated by a dancefloor. The menu could have been my mother's weekly meal plan, which meant it was Buster-approved. I'm a fine one to talk. The only time I broke the burger-fries-Coke routine was when we went there on a Friday night. Then the order was fried fish, fries and Coke. Good Catholics in the meatless Fridays era.

OUR MOST memorable night: when the jukebox got stuck on the Johnny Mercer song, "Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe." We must have heard it 15 times. Days passed before it stopped playing in my head. It still kicks in every now and then.

Vacations ended Saturdays at noon. Halfway home we always stopped at a restaurant called Martin's Chicken in the Rough near North Syracuse. Fried chicken as good as the Colonel’s, but in a place that resembled Joan Crawford’s first restaurant in Mildred Pierce.

Our 1945 stop haunts me still (a feeling reinforced by frequent exposure to The History Channel which is obsessed with the era). World War II had just ended, but the celebrating had yielded to sober reflection. From the jukebox came the sound of Les Brown’s band with Doris Day singing "Sentimental Journey." All around us people began crying.

At 7, I didn’t understand what was happening. My mother tried to explain, but couldn’t. She started crying, too.