She started to leave the table, then turned back. “Oh, by the way, I forgot to say anything about your friend dying. I’m sorry. He was really old, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was. Thank you for remembering him.”

“Does this mean you won’t be coming back?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “I’d miss you,” she said softly, then she left.

No place I visit affects me as deeply, as severely, as the Pine Hill Inn. When I am there, I experience moments that strike me like strobe lights, and each flash is hypnotic in its power.

I came to the Catskills as a seventeen-year-old boy from Georgia, whose neighbors were named Ginn and Carey and Skelton and Winn and Dove. I had never heard a foreign language spoken. I knew only one Jewish family— the Blumenthals, who owned a clothing store. I bought my first suit there, a blue, double-breasted gabardine. In Pine Hill, I met people named Rosenberg and Kraus and Reichmann and Mendelson and Berenstein. They spoke German and Yiddish. Their religion was puzzling and mysterious. They ate food I had never heard of people eating.

Food. When I am in the dining room of the Inn, food is always the first flash of the memory strobe.

Raymond drove me directly from New York City to the Inn. It was a few minutes after one when we arrived. Dessert was being served in the dining room. It was Memorial Day weekend, which Nora Dowling used as a rehearsal for the official summer season beginning in mid-June.

I followed Raymond into the kitchen through a side door that opened to a platform-porch built to hold garbage cans for pickup. Raymond stood at the door until Nora Dowling noticed him. I saw him smile nervously as she crossed the kitchen to us.

Nora Dowling frightened me. She was tall and thick and, I believed, very strong. Her hair was the color of a dried-blood red and it held to her head as though it had barely survived a raving argument with the rest of her body. Her deep green eyes were squinting. She glared at me in a scowl. I could see disappointment quivering in her heavy jowls.

“This is my brother, Bobo,” Raymond said pleasantly. “Bobo, this is Mrs. Dowling. She owns the Inn.”

Timidly I said, “Hello.”

Her eyes covered me. After a moment she said heavily, “He is such a baby.” She sighed, then repeated, “Such a baby.”

I knew she had surprised Raymond. He laughed good-naturedly and said, “Well, you can’t let his looks deceive you. Under those dimples, you’ll find more than a boy.” He reached and touched my shoulder, in part to calm his own uncertainty, I thought, and in part to assure me. “Back home, he ran the farm by himself last year when our father was sick.”