Old Route 52

They say you can never go home again and sometimes that is necessarily so. If home again was Greenfield Park, New York 1974 and it was the place you thought you could get back to where you once belonged. You may need a kleenex or three to assist you perusing my words. There are precious few moments of my life that I have recounted that could hold a matchstick to the Norman Rockwell coated memories I have of this little summer town under the Catskill sun. I have oft journeyed back to my little shangrila where I had my own personal castles in the sky. Each year the faces grew less familiar, the bungalow colonies were now simply time shares  in need of a little renovation. All the grandmas were gone and the children all resigned themselves to the city where the wi-fi access was infinitely more reliable. Those Sunday nights at Tamarack that once rivaled the Copacabana in it's day of hey - was now but the shadow of its once self, lost in its organized rubble an aftermath of the arson that now claimed it.

The halls of Tamarack Lodge now....

The Tamarack how I remembered it then

Screen doors ajar, creaking with the ghosts of country summers past, lawn chair leftovers, abandoned pools - now home and hosts to various moss varieties  and the once Fabergé quality, invigorating air merely an essential measure of oxygen. Only a telltale sign or two speaking and reminders  that these were once the happy houses, the retreats that awaited you, the eye on the prize payoffs , after one's endurance of the nine months of bustle hustle agony preceding, all but ruins now. 

Giving Proust a run for his money

Country roads may not take us home, but we'll always have the Concord Hotel. Is that still there, does anyone still wear a hat?