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Life, death and Angela Park

12.03.10

By MICHAEL APICHELLA

As youngsters, we often money the wrong things. Cars. Stereo apparatus. Clothing. Pop idols. Our parents on the alert us that such stuff settles like bonny meritorious dust on the furniture of our minds and immediately is forgotten. But we don't listen. We're young, and we separate what matters most.

Then, years slip by like grains of sand in an hourglass, and we see that it's absolutely the ordinary things of life that counted, so we look through around the past to validate our present before we d on into the next life. My pal Dave McGeehan found a uniform of his past at Angela Park years after the recreational arena and pool had been sentenced to death. It was a metal tag on an expansible band. You remember. They went with those wicker baskets holding our personal property while we swam the hours away many years ago.

Canny how much I'd like this as a souvenir of my childhood, Dave sent the tag to me here in England - that's the species of guy he is. This moon-shaped quarter-ounce of copper is magical. Whenever I look on it, I get the aroma of chlorine and pizza and sizzling hotdogs and French fries salted and hot, served in a foolscap cone. I hear splashing, shouting, laughing, like a swarm of excited seagulls suddenly exploding into the air. Dave told me he got something, too, a helpmate on the loudspeaker saying, "Joe Barletta, you have a phone call in the backing."

Source: Standard Speaker