If you're wondering just how pasty I was, click on the link.
It's an essay on summers spent in the Irish Catskills--not just by me, but by Irish immigrants decades before that, and those who continue to visit the diminished, but still active, Irish community a few hours north of NYC today.
A snippet:
Every
year, we would spend a week at the O’Neill House, one of around three
dozen Irish resorts in East Durham at the time. We would wake up
groggily with the breakfast bell, spend hours in the pool, hike the
mountain behind the ball field, build rock dams in the creek and play
baseball until the crickets came out. Our parents would then put us to
bed and, along with the rest of the grown-ups, walk up the hill to the
pub for live Irish music and dancing.
Three decades removed from those vacations, there I was, driving my own children to the Irish Catskills. Or what’s left of them.
The Times ran it on the front page of its Sunday "Metropolitan" section in late August. 