My Favorite Summer

Fourth of July has come and gone, and with it the fireworks that are never as good unless you have someone's hand to hold while watching them.  This, for me, has always signaled the peak of summer, and now that we have reached the apex of the year we begin the slow, grinding march toward the lesser seasons, eventually bottoming out sometime during the brutal January winter with numb fingers and sunsets at 4 p.m.  I realize that summer, at least how I see it, is more or less a mental construction put in place by years of public education; from my earliest memories it has been viewed as a three-month block of freedom, a respite from the maddening cycle of studying and tests and studying and papers, a slackening in the ropes of responsibility allowing for a chance to catch one's breath.

Of course, we are adults now.  The ropes do not slacken, we do not breathe.  The cycle of studying and assessments have been replaced by a pounding repetition of bills and commitments from which there is no respite.  And summer, as I experience it now, does not abruptly end with new backpacks and "first day of school pictures", but simply bleeds into autumn, morphing and melting, like a time-lapse movie of a person's life from birth to death.  One day we step outside, into a chilly steel-grey morning, and we realize that summer has passed, has vanished without saying goodbye; the fading was so subtle, the transition was seamless, we didn't even notice.  It is on this day - like the day, months after someone dies, when it finally hits you that they are gone forever - that I become aware of my own fleeting existence, of the ticking seconds that started out so patient but have somehow begun to accelerate.  My youth, like summer, has faded into nothingness, has been slowly dismantled, brick by brick, to build something familiar but new.  

When did this happen?  I didn't even get to say goodbye.

Often, I think back to those boyhood summers, when the days and hours seemed so numerous we did not even know how to fill them all.  When freedom mixed dangerously with boredom, when days of the week meant absolutely nothing.  We were too young, then, to travel or create or fall in love, but old enough to see the world unfolding before us and to begin testing the limitations of our bodies.  We had nothing and everything.  We were completely free to roam the tiny island of our shitty hometowns.

My favorite summer - at least, of my youth, but quite possibly of all time - is the summer after 8th grade, when our fifteen year-old bodies were gathering strength and our brains began formulating truths that would be completely destroyed in the coming years.  We were at the precipice, pausing only momentarily before the plunge into high school and adulthood...the wild roller coaster of growing up, of making mistakes, of realizing that we only get to go on this ride once...

This particular summer, I did not live at home.  Not that my home life was in any way turbulent or overly-strict; my parents were actually very lax and, for some reason, trusted me to make good decisions.  Instead of under their roof, though, which was miles out of town (and might have well been on the moon for my lack of driver's license), I chose to reside, for almost the entire three-month vacation, in my friend Cody's basement.  There, the shades were always drawn, letting little light enter as I sat on his couch watching MTV Spring Break Panama City and wishing that I was old enough to drive.  "I could be there," I thought.  "That could be me with those ridiculously hot eighteen year-olds, dancing like an idiot to some boy band remix.  Why am I not there?!?!"  My angsty propensity for flight had already set in.  We craved the freedom to MOVE.

But we could not leave, were limited by our age and our lack of funds.  After all, we were only fifteen; society had not expected us to get jobs just yet, and we were lucky enough that our parents had the means to indulge our slacker attitude for one more summer.  We were determined to take advantage of it, to squeeze the blood out of the sweltering days, to conquer our small town and stretch our fingertips as far as they would reach, from city limit sign to city limit sign.

Most days, our schedule looked something like this:

• Get up at 8:00 a.m. and stumble directly into Sandy's (Cody's mom) minivan to be taken to summer school.  Cody and I had decided to take P.E. with the pretense of wanting to get the credit out of the way, but really we just wanted to check out girls.  It was a joke, as most summer school classes are.
• After summer school, around noon, we would be picked up and chauffeured back to Cody's place, where we would change into bathing suits and ride our bikes to Michelle Dumontier's house...which happened to have a swimming pool.  Sometimes Michelle wouldn't even be there, but her mom would let us swim anyway.  We were regulars.
• Later we would come home, listen to Blink-182's "Enema of the State" on repeat while shooting tennis balls against his garage door.  We would do this for hours, but mostly because Cody's next door neighbor, Kelly, who was a Junior in high school and therefore automatically desirable, would come outside regularly - I don't even know why she came outside so much, she never seemed to get anything - and would sometimes even talk to us.  We thought we were Gods when this happened.
• After it cooled off, we would usually ride our bikes around town.  We rode bikes everywhere: to the theater, to the skating rink, to the snow cone stand, to this chinese food place that had all-you-can-eat crab legs.  Sometimes we would be gone for hours.  We had no cell-phones, no way of contacting anyone.  (Can kids even do this anymore?)  We were free to explore the town, a two-man cycle gang, getting into everything we could find to get in to.  We were once again in America's Age of Innocence; summer in the Midwest was the 1950's.
• At night, we would find ourselves back in Cody's basement, watching bad T.V., chatting up girls on ICQ, drinking gratuitous amounts of Surge.  Sometimes Sandy would make us pancakes for a late-night snack.  And then, around 2 a.m., I would pile comforters on Cody's linoleum floor (a precursor to my sleeping on airport benches and sheetless box springs) and we would talk about movies and music and sex (or what we knew of it, which was very little) until we fell asleep.  I remember wanting to save the last words either of us spoke before drifting off.  These words always seemed like the most important...

But in the mundane greatness of that summer, one particular memory stands out as my favorite.  One day my father - surely at the urging of my mom who realized that Sandy was actually caring for two teenage boys at this point - took me and Cody to Wal-Mart (still hyphenated in the 90's): The Land of Milk and Honey.  

"Get whatever you want," he said, "I'm footing the bill."

Wait...was he serious?  He was entrusting me and Cody to do our own shopping?!?!  Surely he must know better.  This was just irresponsible parenting.

We made him pay for his misplaced confidence in our decision-making skills.  By the end of the spree, we had cases of highly caffeinated soda, an array of white Hostess product boxes, and multiple packages of cookies and crackers.  We had chips and donuts and and fruit snacks.  We had lots and lots of Easy Cheese.  All in all, we totaled over $100.00 in junk food (which was an obscene amount by 1998 prices).  This food, we were instructed, was to last at least a few weeks, hopefully the rest of the summer.

Okay dad, no problem.

We ate it all in two days.