A huge part of my childhood was taken up with weekends at my grandparents' house in Long Island City. In my memory I was there every weekend. It's probably not entirely true—we all know how unreliable those childhood memories are—but regardless, I have an enormous store of memories that revolve around my grandmother. My sister's blogged about her (you can see a picture of her there), but, you see, my sister's considerably, ahem, younger than I am, so we have very different experiences of our grandmother. I had the good fortune of being the first grandchild, and Grandma had the misfortune of having a husband who was much happier sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of gin and a pack of cigarettes than seeing a show at Radio City Music Hall, shopping on Hester Street, or getting into arguments with fruit vendors about the price of plums. She needed a companion, and I was, I like to believe, a pretty adventuresome kid.
That's how it came to be that an inordinate amount of my early childhood memories take place looking up at Grandma Mariano as she took my hand and we set off for a day of adventure.
In retrospect, I kind of can't believe how lucky I was. Not many five- or six-year-olds have an energetic grandmother who's genuinely interested in them, and happy to spend a day going to the circus. And not many grandmothers were so interesting themselves, I'll bet. She loved to argue, didn't suffer fools, was always looking to sneak in someplace, break rules, steal a piece of fruit. (Or something bigger. Who are we kidding? She was a thief.) It was exciting, scary, and thrilling to be with her. And she made a delicious BLT and homemade raviolis. Jealous?
One of her favorite places was Coney Island.
So, as soon as summer hit, many, many Saturdays involved getting on the subway in Queens and taking it all the way to its end: Coney Island. In those days (yes, I know, I'm OLD), there were still subway cars with cane seats and ceiling fans, and I can recall with complete clarity the scratchy cane on the back of my thighs as we chugged along on that LOOOONG subway ride, and then ran to the beach to swim, swim, swim, ate hot dogs at Nathans and then maybe went on a ride or two before the long subway ride back, crunchy with salt from the ocean, and itchy with sand.
And somehow in all the years since I was a little girl at Coney Island with grandma, I never made it back. Never?
Until last week.
I finally went back to Coney Island to walk the boardwalk, check out the rides, and, yes, eat a dog at Nathans (this time with a beer).
We called our friends Roger and Randall, who happen to share the fine quality of being up for anything. Plus, we were willing to drive and it was a spectacular day.
The strangest things for me was how little I felt like this was the place I remembered. Amazing how our memories can seem so clear, yet in reality be so cloudy. Everything was oriented differently than in my memory, and, of course, things have probably changed a bit since 1970.
We headed for the Wonder Wheel, which seemed like exactly the right idea.
I mean, you HAVE to go on a ride at Coney Island, right? Especially if you're too chicken to go for a swim. And, if you're going to go on the Wonder Wheel, you need to GO FOR IT. Right?
Until you see someone cleaning vomit out of one of the cars and wonder, hmm, am I really the swinging type?
But we screwed up our collective courage and got in the swinging car. Except, I did have to say: NO SWINGING!
I'll admit. There was swinging. There was screaming. But most of all there was laughing. Now that we had been adequately swung, it was time for that dog. With fries.
And more wandering. Oh, how we amused ourselves:
And amused ourselves:
And then back home. Grandma might have called us all wimps for not swimming, but I like to thnk she still would have been proud. Next time: The Cyclone.
