Beach Memories

My parents met in a small beach town on the coast of Maryland. From that first meeting came a romance, a wedding, and then four children. I've been going to Ocean City, Maryland for as long as I can remember. First with my family and then with others. The summers I don't remember have been captured in old black-and-white movies and photos. 

As a teenager, I started going down to the beach with friends. I spent a week with friends before my Senior year of high school and the requisite beach week of beer and shenanigans after graduating.

In my early 20s, I'd take a day trip down on my days off in the summer keeping the beach tradition alive.

Once I moved to DC the trips to OC were fewer. Even so, each and every trip was like a walk back in time. I could see myself as a 5-year-old laughing and screaming on the kiddie rides, then as a teenager banging into every car imaginable on the bumper cars. I have a vision of me walking the beach at night with my best friend Suzanne in search of the cute boys we'd run into earlier, and stopping in disbelief when I heard that Elvis Presley had died. Every block of the 9-mile stretch holds some sort of memory, so it's easy to get lost in thoughts when I'm there.

This weekend I'll be taking my mom for an overnight- the second trip we've taken there since my dad died over a year and a half ago. I like to hear the stories she tells of the times she spent there. Well, every story except for when she points out the hotel where my brother was conceived- that one not so much.

There was the hurricane they rode out in Ocean City, and the hotel she and her best friend Ruth stayed in the year they met my dad. She'll tell me how there was nothing past 42nd Street for many years, she'll wonder how they ever found room for all the condos that have been built in the last 30 years. 

And then there will be times of quiet. Times when we will both be, no doubt, completely in our own heads thinking of our own memories that occurred in that tiny little beach town.