Lake Placid.....

 ....someone mentions Lake Placid and my memory goes back, probably for the last time, back more than 50 years and a like number of pounds ago, back to before I was aged and decrepit. What I write here, since so much time has passed, can no longer be seen as self-aggrandizement, I hope and trust, but we, Barbara and I had the time of our lives. I so wish I could run this account by her one more time.

   I had spent that summer at Oneonta College, finishing up my Master's Degree. I had become friends with Dee, a student there, and later that winter she and 5 of her classmates had arranged a trip to Lake Placid and Dee asked if I would like to join them there. I did, and because I never liked to go anywhere alone, I invited Barbara. 

  We were all to meet at a designated hotel in the evening; there would be us eight girls. So Barbara and I set off in Dorothy's green Pontiac, as my car was having brake issues. We left in the evening and during a snowfall. The roads then were very rural, no highway, just dark and winding snow-filled country roads. And of course no phone or directional assistance. But we found the address, and stared, aghast. The hotel was on the edge of town, an isolated area in itself. But the huge spreading structure  looked deserted, dilapidated, eerie,and abandoned. In other words, which were both mine and Barbara's, almost exactly like the hotel in Psycho. It was late when we arrived, with slippery roads, so we knew the others would not arrive. We decided to look for other lodging for that first night. Back to town we drove, finding several motel units with no-vacancy signs, and at least two that had vacancy signs, but would not admit us. Someone told us later motels would not admit women late at night.Those times. Eventually we found a motel that agreed to let us in, but the unit had no heat. We stayed there anyway.

 The next day we drove to the haunted hotel on the hill and located the other girls there. They had just arrived, having not wanted to drive there in a snowstorm. Smarter than us. We did some usual day stuff there, I bought a handbag and then we discussed a place for dinner. Some girl suggested a Teahouse which we'd driven past, but I remember holding out for The Steakhouse, thinking that would hold more possibilities. That's where we went, a table for 8 girls. As luck would have it, our table was next to a table full of men, the entire Ottawa Police Force Hockey Team, which was scheduled to play a game that evening. I was sitting at the end of the table, by design,  and after we'd eaten one of the officers, Buddy, the best looking one at that, moved his chair to the edge of our table and offered me a cigarette. It was of a brand or type unknown to me,Canadian maybe,  but of course I accepted. As usual, I got the comment, "You don't smoke, do you?"  But he considered me a good sport to have tried and he invited me to their game, saying he'd leave 2 tickets in my name at the box office. Yay!

  And this is where my Taylor Swift moment transpired. I'd of course invited B, and as we started to find our seats, in the packed arena, the Canadian team was already lined up  on the ice just before the game started, and the whole team greeted me by name. Afterwards, Dee's friends told her they thought her new friends were"fast" or maybe worse because we took  off with strange men, even later going dancing in the next town, and, you know, getting to know each other. But, hey, they were police officers. B. had wild memories of having to defend her honor, but me, I always got the nice guy. We actually exchanged pictures and letters for almost a year, but when I didn't take him up on his invitations for me to visit him, the budding romance ended. Alas.

But back to Lake Placid. We also went to Whiteface Mountain and later took the Mt. Von Hoevenberg Bobsled run. The week before the bobsled carrying Miss Rhein-

gold had crashed and she was hospitalized,  so soon after that, they stopped running the bobsleds from the very top of the run. But we got the full run, where you wear a helmet and are snuggled in between a guy at the front who steered and a guy at the back who did whatever ruddering bobsleds do. Turned out the speed was such that the sled rides the side of the tunnel all the way down. All I saw and felt was flying ice.