The perfect summers - and why I prefer fall
His name was Kelly, his hair was Scandinavian blonde, and
his eyes were a startling ice blue. I
met him by accident, actually; my friend pushed me in his direction at the
roller rink and told me to ask him if he wanted to skate. With her.
With all of the naiveté and innocence of a 5th
grader, I stumble-skated over to him and before I could open my mouth, he
grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the rink for the slow skate. I looked back at my friend, stricken, but she
just shrugged and gave me a thumbs-up (is there any doubt she is still like a
sister to me 30 years later?).
That summer, Kelly and I were “going together” but never
went anywhere, in the typical fashion of children still in elementary
school. We shared an ice cream sundae
and sat on the front porch of my parents’ steps. He would tell me when he was going to call,
and I waited anxiously near the phone, before the days of voice mail or call waiting. I would twirl the
coiled blue phone cord around my fingers as I spoke to him on the old blue telephone
with the rotary dial, and check off topics from the short list I had prepared,
lest I run out of things to say. The
J.Geils band “Freeze Frame” will forever remind me of that boy, as it was
playing in the background during one of those nervous, sweat-inducing calls.
He went off to junior high school that fall, and my friend
Tracey and I would hit a tennis ball back and forth in front of his house at
the end of the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. We rode our banana-seated, tassel-handled
bicycles down the road to the 7-11 to buy Slurpees in various sugary flavors,
or a little further to the drug store with its rainbow of candy. Or we would stuff ourselves with ice cream
and lie on the grass, commiserating over the stomachaches we had.
The lightening bugs were plentiful that summer, and the
Indiana nights warm and sticky. One
night, during a rousing pitch-dark game of Ghosts in the Graveyard, my parents’
driveway was packed full with bikes from 20 kids from all over the
neighborhood. And with a muffled “Ouch!” one of the older
boys tripped on a bike strewn carelessly, and the whole driveway
clanged with the sound of metal hitting metal.
They all came down like dominoes.
Laughing, everyone untangled their steeds and rode them home by the
light of the fireflies.
There were block parties and Jaycees meetings for our
parents, church picnics and slumber parties.
My best friend and I thought we would be funny and have our own
drug-free version of a “rainbow party” (in which kids allegedly threw various
pills in a bowl and took a handful in the late 70s and early 80s, which is much
different than the “rainbow parties” of today).
So we filled a bowl with several kinds of candy, and we gave ourselves a
sugar high. We played “light as a
feather, stiff as a board” and an encounter with a Ouija board made us believe
in spirits and scared the hell out of us.
I never thought of my parents as “free range” but I remember
telling my mother where I was going, and then I went. I didn’t have a cell phone or GPS device. Or even a compass. I had my friends and I had my sister, and we
all stuck together like glue. The only
place I remember going by myself was the time I “ran away”, angry with some
injustice toward my pre-teen self, and left my house for a couple of
hours. I grabbed my tape recorder, my
sketch pad, and pencil, and I walked to the edge of our neighborhood, where the
wild strawberries grew in the dirt. I
cooled off as I sketched the landscape and dreamed of all the places I would
travel. When I returned home a few hours
ago, all I got for my tantrum was a hug and a look of understanding from my
loving mother.
I think about those early summers, and the idyllic childhood
I didn’t realize that I had. I remember
the body I had then and didn’t appreciate.
And the hair I ruined with Sun-In.
And what I recall, often, are the boys I chased, and later dated, in
high school and college. I think about
the string of broken hearts: mine and theirs.
There was the boy with whom I fell head over heels in love
in two weeks, left for summer vacation in New Jersey, and came back to find out
that he had gotten back together with the recent ex-girlfriend he had railed
about for the two weeks we spent together.
Lesson learned: there is a fine line between love and hate.
There was the young Greek man who told me he loved me one July, and I ran as far away as I could.
There was the long-haired singer from a local band in Cincinnati
who had more girlfriends than he could handle, and I turned a blind eye. We spent the summer playing guitar languidly
on the porch in the heat of the night, possibly keeping my roommates awake.
There was the boy who brought eggs to the drive-in where I worked when I
was a teenager so I could add them to his milkshakes; I never knew what a
fantastic man he would become until many years later, when he gave me the
beginning of my self-esteem back. Our
timing was bad, but the connection was a summer of fireworks and trampolines
and long email messages.
And later still, I spent the end of the summer dating after
becoming suddenly single at the end of a 10-year relationship, and I started talking on the phone to
the man who would become my husband.
This man of summer became mine for all the seasons, and we
married in the fall a few years after we met.
Fall is the perfect season for my life right now; I have said goodbye to all
of the boys of summer and held onto the best of the memories, and I welcomed
the middle years of my life with the joyful acceptance that summer is hot and
fleeting, and fall is warm, welcoming, and the start of new beginnings.
Two of the best things that have ever happened to me occurred in the fall: the wedding of my dreams to the man I have been waiting for all of my life, and the birth of our son, three years later. While the trees and flowers are going dormant and shedding their leaves and getting ready to sleep for the winter, to me, it's the time for rebirth - much more so than the spring.
Happy anniversary this month to the man who brought me to
the best season of my life.
Welcome, fall. Always.
Love,
