Summer Days

I never really did understand how it worked.  As the daylight hours get shorter the days get hotter.  It’s just the opposite of winter when the daylight hours get longer but the days get colder.  I guess it has something to do with the length of time that it takes the sun’s rays to come to the earth and the time that it takes for the earth to actually heat up or cool down.  Regardless, it’s this time of year that my mind drifts back to the days of my childhood in Indiana.

The water seemed to crawl at a snail’s pace through the roots of the old sycamore tree down at the creek.  The mosquitoes even lost interest except at night when they competed for attention with the lightening bugs in the evening hours.  We’d catch the lightening bugs and put them in a Mason jar and watch them through the night.  They never seemed to make it to daylight when we kept them in those jars.  About the only way to keep cool during those summer days was to wait for night time.  Sometimes that didn’t help any.  There was one other way.  That was to get onto our bikes and ride as fast as we could and let the wind whisk the sweat away.  The only problem with that was we’d work up a sweat while we were trying to get rid of it.

The best part of summer was spending time with friends.  We could never do that in school.  At least we couldn’t do that and not get into trouble.  My summers were often filled in the company of Richard Miller, Jerry Smith, Steve Watkins, Billy Paris, or Tommy Perkins.  Sometimes the days were filled with all of them and more.  There were pickup baseball games and trips to the fishing hole.  On occasion Richard’s mother would take pity on us and drive us to one of the nearby lakes to go swimming.  She would pile a bunch of us into the back of their station wagon and we’d have an afternoon of cool, refreshing lake water.

And there were camping trips without adult supervision.  I’ll not forget the time we went camping by a nearby creek when someone brought a rubber snake and stuck it on somebody’s sleeping bag.  Everyone was in on it except for the poor victim.  I waited with a certain amount of anticipation for the expected reaction.  The reaction happened and we all got a good laugh out of it.  I never thought for a minute that my good friends who I trusted with my very life would pull the same prank on me.  I bolted from the tent at the speed of summer’s lightening and practically jumped across the creek to get away from the rubber snake that didn’t look at all like rubber in the dimly lit tent.  If I remember correctly, Jerry got sick on that little camping trip.  I don’t know if the rare chicken he ate had anything to do with his appendicitis.  

Sleeping outside under the stars always helped us cool down.  Aside from watching for fireflies, we’d lay awake and watch for passing satellites.  We’d often spot them as they traversed the Milky Way, but more often than not we’d fall asleep as we gazed into the heavens.  On occasion, the heavens opened up and we got wet.  Sometimes Richard Miller and I would make clothesline tents.  We’d drape sheets and blankets over the clotheslines and spend hours talking about our futures and who we were going to marry.

As we got older our cooling off attempts matured a little.  We drove ourselves to swimming sites or to Brown County where there were tons of shade trees to cool our lives down to a tolerable level.  Evenings were spent at one of two restaurants in Greenwood, sometimes both.  Jerry’s was a favorite hangout as was the Kitchen, a drive-in restaurant.  You could get Kentucky Fried Chicken at the Kitchen.  There was a Dairy Queen not too far away from Jerry’s and the Kitchen, but we didn’t spend a lot of time there.  Darn.

Then of course there were the two drive-in movie theaters, the Meridian Drive-in and the Greenwood Drive-in.  Most of the time we just went as friends.  Or, as friends, we’d go watch a softball game in Smith’s Valley and maybe visit the Beehive Restaurant after the games.  Sometimes we’d get our little Dixieland band (Richard Miller, Rick Daniel, Mike Shaddy, Gary Bruce, Jerry Smith, and me) and just jam.

Life was much simpler then.  We didn’t have smartphones and i-Pads to keep us occupied.  We spent most of our time looking up instead of into our laps and actually talking to each other face-to-face instead of sending cryptic messages by tapping our thumbs against a little glass plate.  We splashed in the water and rode our bikes in spite of the heat - or because of it.  As much as we didn’t look forward to school in the fall, we looked forward to being with our friends who lived on the other side of the township.  Most of all, we didn’t complain about the heat.  We tried to do something about it.  We knew we couldn’t do anything about the heat itself, but we knew we could choose our reaction to it.

Things are different today.  We walk from an air-conditioned house to an attached garage and step into our air-conditioned cars and drive to the air-conditioned mall where we shop in air-conditioned stores.  Then we reverse the process.  Our vacations consist of travel in an air-conditioned steel tube traveling at 34,000 feet and two-thirds the speed of sound.  We move into an air-conditioned terminal where we travel in an air-conditioned bus to the air-conditioned car rental facility.  We drive to the air-conditioned motel where we go outside to swim under the sun and complain about the heat and get sunburned.  When the vacation is over we reverse that process again and return to work in our air-conditioned offices or businesses.

I miss the summer days of yesteryear.  I miss the sweet smell of newly mowed lawns and the sound of pebbles plopping into the pooled water in the creek.  I miss counting the number of skips I can get a flat rock to make across the water.  I miss seeing the chicken hawks circling overhead and the crack of a baseball bat against a burning pitched baseball.  I miss the sweat dripping down my forehead and into my eyes.  I miss telling Mom that I’m headed over to Richard’s house.  I miss pulling weeds in the driveway and flower bed in the early hours of the morning.  I miss getting together with my high school friends to do nothing of import together.  I miss accidentally falling into the creek on those hot summer days when I was supposed to be dipping a fishing line in the water.  I miss roasting hot dogs over a campfire (followed by flaming marshmallows).  I miss the baseball cards packed in with the bubble gum.  I miss attaching a clipped piece of cardboard to the front wheel of my bicycle so it would make a motor sound as it slapped against the spokes of the wheel.  I miss riding facing backwards in Richard’s parents’ station wagon.  I miss all the cool things we did to distract our minds from the warming days of summer.  I think I must be getting old.  I’m starting to sound like my father.

It's funny how as a child and a teenager you look forward to the day when you are an adult and can do all the things you dream about doing and as an adult you look back to the days when you enjoyed doing what you did.  It doesn’t much matter.  Things remain the same with a few exceptions.  Kids today still look forward to being an adult and we old timers look back on those summer days with fondness.

Except for a week, I wouldn’t want to be a teenager again for anything.  I’d spend the morning pulling weeds out of the flower garden then just be lazy in the afternoon.  I’d go with my friends to Jerry’s or the Kitchen for dinner then we’d go jamming to some Dixieland music until it was time to head off to the drive-in theater.  Afterwards it would be fun to build a campfire and roast hotdogs and make s’mores until three in the morning.  I’d go home and lay out in the back yard and watch for satellites and shooting stars until I drifted off to sleep. 

I wonder if I would complain if I went back to those days.