When I try to think of a place that I have an emotional connection to in this blue and green sphere we call Earth, I can only think of one spot. When I was younger, during the summer months off from school, my friends and I would ride our bikes to Wolfs Pond Park. Wolfs Pond Park is on Hylan Boulevard, it is approximately 3 miles from my house. This park was our second home during the summer. It had everything a young boy could want; basketball courts, tennis courts, a hockey rink, a beach ,and a whole lot of woods and open grass fields.
This park was a place where boys could be boys. We could do what we pleased without the hassle of having parents telling us what not to do. We would wake-up every morning around 9am and spend the whole day outdoors. Every morning it was the same routine, the first person to wake up would start calling everyone to wake them up. After all the courtesy calls were made, we rounded up the troops. One kid would ride to a friends house, then they rode to someone else's house and so on, until everyone was out of their homes and ready to be outside for the day. .
We would always stop off at the deli near my house. The bikes were lined up against the deli wall as if we were a motorcycle gang stopping off at a bar to knock down a few beers before terrorizing the roads again. My bike was the ugliest, of all the bikes. I bought my bike from a yard sale for fifteen dollars. It was a solid white frame with rust spots all over. My mother felt bad, she bought me some GT stickers, so we could try to spruce it up a tad. The stickers worked just as well as someone who sprays too much cologne on, to hide a foul offensive odor. We would buy the same things every day. I remember begging my mother for five dollars every morning, while I ate my breakfast, before she went to work so I could buy red quarter drinks and my favorite candy bar, a payday. All of the workers at the deli knew us by name and we knew them the same.
