We went for one week, and the whole rest of the year pointed at it.
One Week a Year and a Roll of Quarters |
Saltwater taffy, a wooden coaster that shook the whole structure, and a boardwalk that stayed lit long after we should have been in bed. |
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News for the America we remember |
We went for one week, and the whole rest of the year pointed at it. |
My father took his vacation the same week every summer, and the car got loaded the night before, and we drove down in the dark to beat the traffic, which never worked. The trunk had the folding chairs and the umbrella with the bent rib and a cooler my mother packed so we would not have to buy lunch, and we did not buy lunch, all week, not once. |
The place we stayed was two blocks off the boardwalk and had linoleum floors and a screen door with a spring that slammed. It was not nice. Nobody expected it to be nice. It cost what my father could pay, and it was near the water, and that was the entire specification. You could hear the boardwalk from the room at night. Not the words of anything, just the general hum of it, the music and the machines and people, and the ocean underneath all of it. |
Here is what the money looked like. My father would take out a roll of quarters at the beginning of the week and hand out a certain number a day, and when they were gone they were gone. Ten quarters was a fortune and also nothing at all, because the arcade would eat it in twenty minutes if you were careless. So you learned to be careful. You watched a machine before you played it. You found the pinball table with the soft flipper that the owner had not fixed, and you learned it, and you could make a quarter last twenty minutes on that one table on a good |
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