Walking back from the mailbox the other day, I noticed a couple of coins lying on the ground — a quarter and a dime. As I stooped to pick them up, I thought of the days when, as small boy accompanying my mother to work at Prince’s Place at the foot of Newfound Lake, I would crawl under the long deck that ran the length of the store and restaurant, where I could hide from the crowds overhead and play in the soft sand. I often found coins there: money that slipped between the planks when people dropped change while playing the pinball machines that lined the deck overhead. I gladly claimed the change as my own while listening to the endless jukebox tunes playing on the outside speakers — Diana Ross, Petula Clark, the Beach Boys, and Del Shannon.
Sometimes when both parents were working, because we rarely had babysitters, my sister and I would accompany my mother as she shared duties of waitressing, running the store, and cleaning the cabins. Kathi and I would bring along paper and pencils to draw or write stories, or we’d wander among the cabins until it was time to go home.
Other times, I’d accompany my father to Dave Gordon’s sawmill in Boscawen, which bordered the Sky Hi Drive-in, and while he ran the edger, I’d pass the time playing in the sawdust pile, riding along when the drivers took loads of freshly sawed boards to the lumber yard, checking out the dump behind the drive-in to see if someone had thrown away anything valuable, and wandering through the parking lot lined with speakers on poles that movie-goers would rest on the car windows to hear the events taking place on the large screen. Like the sand under the deck at Prince’s Place, the Sky-Hi parking lot was a treasure trove of dropped coins — mostly quarters — and I’d often come home with three or four dollars-worth of change.
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