Each summer, as my dad drove our family across the Route 50 bridge into Ocean City, I unrolled the back window and stuck my head out like a dog.

Sea gulls whooped overhead, sunlight flashed on the bay and the ferris wheel spun slowly at Trimper’s Rides in the distance. The breeze sprayed a scrim of salt on my skin.

“Ocean City, here we come!” I would shout to my parents, siblings and grandparents.

As a child, I dreamed all year of this moment. My sister and I began writing a packing list in March. I filled my suitcase on the first day of summer break. By the time we squeezed into the car in late July, I could hardly bear the excitement.

“Capture an Ocean City memory” went the ad that played on TV when I was a kid in the 1980s.

As I began reporting a story about the town’s 150th anniversary, I realized how many others are fascinated by Ocean City memories. Perhaps it’s because some attractions, like Trimper’s 1912 carousel, have remained largely unchanged for generations. Some buildings have borne witness to history, like the Black-owned Henry Hotel, which hosted stars such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington during segregation.

My childhood memories of Ocean City are as bright as a stack of postcards: the thwack of a miniature golf club, sand crabs scurrying into o-shaped holes, the hot slap of sand on my bare feet.

Our vacations were mini family reunions; my grandmother’s brother and his wife, their children, in-laws and grandchildren often scheduled trips for the same time. For my grandmother and her brother, children of Lithuanian immigrants, a week in Ocean City felt like an American dream come true.

The boardwalk, in particular, loomed large in my imagination as a child. I looked wistfully at the hermit crabs in their sad cages. I spent fistfuls of quarters on sets of scented jelly bracelets. I wandered dazed among the crowds and spinning lights at Trimper’s. I felt a shiver of fear when the coffin doors at the Haunted House clapped shut behind me.

My mother would take us to a portal to her own memories: Laffing Sal at the Ocean City Life-Saving Station Museum at the southern tip of the Boardwalk. The larger-than-life papier-maché mannequin with wavy blonde hair and a missing front tooth presided over Jester’s Fun House during my mother’s childhood. When you pressed a button, her laugh played: a tinny old recording of a gulping, billowing guffaw, alternately euphoric, hysterical and frightening.

Reminiscing about the Ocean City of the past was part of vacation for my elders. They could conjure in their mind’s eyes the boardwalk of the 1950s and ’60s as easily as I can now recall that of the ’80’s and ‘90s.

Even my siblings, who are nine and 10 years older than me, spoke fondly of “the good old days” in Ocean City before I was born.

There is something about being at the beach that makes us acutely aware of the passage of time. When I traveled to Ocean City with my husband and children this month, I felt a pang of longing for all the family who weren’t with us. I wished my grandparents, who died long ago, were sitting at the kitchen table playing pinochle, eating crabs and drinking near beer.

I even felt a longing for the past versions of my living relatives. I missed seeing my mother, Diane Scharper, a writer, her long hair wound in a bun, waving my siblings back from the deep water. She would often be struck with inspiration at the beach. She published an essay in the “Baltimore Sun” in 1986 with her own reflections on Ocean City.

“We get in touch with ourselves,” she wrote. “We slow down and notice things. It’s the rhythm of the place that gets to us.”

I thought about how my niece, now about to graduate from high school, was obsessed with Happy Jack’s pancakes in kindergarten. I remembered my 12-year-old son as a toddler chasing sea gulls. I looked back at photos of my older daughter splashing in an inflatable duck on the beach. I thought about my younger daughter pointing at kites from her stroller.

The beach is where many of us develop a sense of the infinite. Children dig in the numberless grains of sand. (For parents, cleaning up sand is a different experience of infinity.)

Then there is the ocean itself. The thing that never changes about the ocean is that it constantly changes. The waves have never stopped lapping the shore. The same ocean sounds have lulled humans to sleep for millions of years.

One day, if we are fortunate, my children will take their own children to this beach, look out at this same ocean and tell stories about their good old days — the ones happening right now.