I locate myself in time by which stepfather was present. The earliest memories occur without one. Just me and Mom and brother Chris in a little New York City apartment. It was nice. Not the apartment, but the feeling between us.

From age five to 11, there was Ken. He was charming and handsome, but he was a monster. “It was only a few years!” my mother would protest when confronted with my memories of that time. “But Mom, that was my childhood,” I’d say.

From 11 to 16, there was Peter. Not a stepfather; he was a “friend.” He was much younger than Mom, about 28 when they met. She was in her late 30s. Go Mom.

That’s how I figure I was around 13 when we first came up to the Catskills with Peter to visit his friend Elliot. Elliot’s parents owned the  White Lake Motel in Bethel, NY. It was the motel I recognized when I got off the bus to go to the Woodstock Music & Art Festival when I was 17. I was alone, soaking wet, hungry, tired and essentially lost. But no, wait, there is Elliot’s motel! 

He opened the door and stood there looking at me. “Cassie!” he declared. It took him a minute to usher me in out of the rain, but he did. We stood in the tiny office of the motel and made small talk. I eyed the narrow daybed in his office. Following my gaze, he said, “Sorry, but we are all booked tonight.” I would tell my mother that story later. He told her I was high, that my eyes were red. The truth is, I may be the only teenager who went to Woodstock and didn’t get high. And anyway, why would you put your friend’s underage daughter out into the night if she was on drugs? Elliot eventually made a place for himself in Woodstock history, but not the place he deserved.

My next adventure in the Catskills was in the summer of 1982. I was 30 and my new beau had a bungalow he took his two young boys to on the weekends. The bungalow colony was made up of a group of artists and other bohemian types who lived in SoHo and Tribeca. There were 10 units with a large in-ground swimming pool and 58 acres of forest and fields. 

When we drove through the village of Monticello, I recognized it from my Woodstock adventure in 1969. There was the Bagel Bakery I had visited on Monday after starving all weekend. There was the diner and the bus terminal and the movie theater. Nothing much had changed in the 13 years since my tribe had invaded Sullivan County, making history.

Eventually I married the beau, and we kept the bungalow. Summer weekends were almost always spent there in our little house with him and the two boys. Then they grew up and found other places to explore. We made two more children, a boy and a girl, and our fellow neighbors made children of their own. Soon we had a whole new generation of bungalow kids. City kids who spent their summer weekends playing tag in the fields or under the big pine trees making fairy villages out of sticks and pine cones or learning to swim in the pool. At night, when the children were asleep, the grownups gathered at a bonfire or on decks, drinking and debating whether Abstract Expressionism was dead.

There was no TV and for many years no telephones except for one communal phone in a phone booth that was close to our bungalow. When the phone rang, somebody had to answer it and go find the person it was ringing for. Usually it was for the real estate guy, Siim. We never figured out an easier way to deal with this than running to the phone before it stopped ringing, asking who the call was for and running to their house, yelling, “Siim! Phone call!” It’s hard to believe that we lived like that, now that everyone has a phone attached to them.

After a few years of making the long trek home along Route 17 on Sunday nights, I balked and we agreed I would stay upstate with our children while my husband went back to work in the city during the week. The one good memory I had of the years with the monster stepfather was the summers I spent at his family’s estate in Canada. There were fields to roam, long bike rides and a big swimming pool that I spent as much time as I could in. Our bungalow life reminded me of that time and I never wanted it to end.

Fortunately for me, my husband was not the philandering type and our marriage survived the midweek absences, making weekends even fonder.