It was a typical warm, sunny Saturday on Third Street. My daughter woke early, sussed out the weather conditions and begged, "Can we please take out the pastic pool?"

I declined because we no longer have access to the basement hose the way we used to, but we went downstairs anyway. My daughter found a big cardboard box in the recyling, flattened it, and created a make-shift beach.

Soon her best friend, who lives on the first floor, came out and the two of them were slathering their bodies with suntan lotion and lying on the cardboard, sunbathing Brooklyn style. Jokingly, I said, "Hey, where are your bikinis?"  And the next thing I knew they were running into the  building to put their bikinis on.

When my daughter’s friend from around the corner came over for a day-long play date I heard my daughter tell her:  "It’s a beach party!" The friend was promptly escorted home to get her tankini and the girls were set for a day of fun and sun at the beach. The beach on Third Street, that is.

One of my neighbors recalled how when she was a kid in Bensonhurst they’d go sunbathing on their apartment building rooftop. "You ever hear the expression ‘tar beach?’" she said. "’Well that’s what we used to call it.’"

The girls were not deterred when the weather changed mid-afternoon. It certainly didn’t  interupt their beach behavior as they continued pouring buckets of warm water on one another in an attempt to simulate swimming.

The parents, meanwhile, did what parents in our building do on a lazy Memorial Weekend day. We sat on the green plastic lawn furniture we keep in the basement, read the New York Times, drank ice coffees and tried to keep the children’s noise level down to a comfortable minimum.

Needless to say, we didn’t put on our swimsuits. But I did find the smell of Coppertone amazingly evocative of a summer’s day on the beach. A real beach, that is.