I was 9 nine years old and he was working at the/Metuchen Ford plant assembly line/Now he just sits on a stool down at the Legion hall/but I can tell what’s on his mind, Glory Days. ~ Bruce Springsteen

Summertime, my family is at the beach. For a few years after I moved back to Buffalo, I mooched cottage space off my uncle Bill. He has rented cottages since he was a teen when he and his buddies pooled their meager funds. Now, that I have kids, my mom rents a cottage along Sunset Bay. We contribute a mere pittance towards the rent and she allows us to have the run of the place. By the weekend, other family members come south from the city.

On this day, I situated my family on the beach. Uncle Bill gave his laundry list of South Buffalo beach protocol that I had flubbed: I used a bedspread as a beach blanket which rained down the same disapproval as Martha Stewart might were she to catch me using a table runner as a shawl. And then I forgot to freeze the water bottles the night before. Before a swim, he does yoga in the grass. Even if he were hip to the protocol, in South Buffalo he's considered eccentric, too. Many civil servants come to Sunset Beach in the summer and I have yet to see any but my uncle doing yoga on the beach.

Eventually, one of his beach buddies (someone he knows is always walking along the beach) stopped to talk to him. My uncle claims I’m anti-social because with his friends, I mostly keep to myself. South Buffalonians tend to talk insider stuff: who knows whom from where, who got this job or that, who married whom. I know some of it but not enough to keep up.

I left the kids with my mom and went for some French fries. As I neared Cabana Sam’s, Vacation by the GoGos blasted from the open air bar. The GoGos summoned me back to the summer of ’81 when I high schooled in Oregon and vacationed in Buffalo.

That summer, my other uncle’s ex-girlfriend M took me everywhere with her. We cruised the Southtown beaches—smoked cigarettes, read trashy magazines, baked in the sun. With my fake ID tucked in a pocket, she’d take me to the Bayview Beach Club (now Dock of the Bay), Captain Kidds, or Mickey Rats. We drank vodka/teas and danced, sometimes with a guy or just with each other. My uncle would show up later and they’d drop me off at my grandparents’ house.

Those summer days on the beach, I felt as if I were on the brink of something. Isn’t that adolescence? Not quite anywhere yet, but right on the edge of life. I didn’t realize it then, but that was life: it wasn’t about to start, it was already moving along; there is no destination except the one we all try to avoid. But never again did I feel that surge of anticipation as I did during that summer.

With the flush of youthful memory ripping through me, I suddenly felt old, fat, tired and spent, like an emphysema-riddled rabbit chasing a dried up carrot. That’s the problem with nostalgia: the youth in it seems to mock present circumstances.

For a few years when I first moved here, I worked at my brother’s tavern. The patrons there engaged endlessly in the “remember whens” and reminiscent musings of Buffalo in its heyday—when Bethlehem Steel ascended. I wanted to scream – “IT’S OVER. MOVE ON. All you have is today and you’re wasting it.”

Today on the beach I wasn’t much better than those old guys. The GoGos had plunged me deep into memory and disoriented me to the present. Suddenly, I heard my name and saw her face—M. There she was again.

Nostalgia is such a trap, and it can really be pervasive here. The remains of the steel plant trigger memories to keep the wheels of nostalgia rolling on. Sometimes it’s like living in a cemetery with a vast, empty, rusted mausoleum of the past. If I had a few drinks with M and avoided any mirrors, maybe the vodka/teas would have tricked my brain. “Vacation/ All I ever wanted.”

Instead of getting pulled back, I pointed out my sons playing on the beach and asked her to stop by and say hello. My sons may grow up alongside the hull of an industrial past, but I can’t have them raised by a mother ghosted by her youth. Forget the steel plant and the GoGos; there are better days to be had along the shores of Lake Erie.