Echoes of a Summer Night

Only a single week of July left.  One last draught of fiery perfection.  Drink deep the heat and light and dark of real summer.  The lightning bugs flash from the grass and trees and trigger memories of a young boy collecting those living phosphors and watching them far into the night.  Where do those memories reside in my old brain?  What other memories do they trigger?  People who have been gone from this world for decades.  But I can still hear their voices and see their expressions.  Kind and cruel, smart and slow, funny and humorless, warm and cold, sane and mad.  And all these traits mixed in many combinations and proportions.  All those summer nights, all those years ago.

All those parties and occasions where we talked about the future and all the things we wanted to do and all we hoped to achieve.  And some of it we did.  And some of it worked out as we hoped.  But so many things fell by the wayside and some spectacularly so.  But those of us left must keep moving forward because there is no other way.  We just keep time to the beat of the days and seasons ticking by cycle after cycle trying to keep up with the pace and maintain a relevance with the waves of younger and livelier participants in the dance.

I was talking to my young granddaughter about her vacation in Maine.  I asked her what she liked best and she said she loved it all; the sand, the water, the sun, the amusement park rides, the carnival foods, the ice cream shop.  So, I told her the story of how we came to pick that beach; how an old friend, an old engineering friend who was more than thirty years older than me answered a question.  I asked him where I could find a nice long beach with white sand that wasn’t horribly crowded, expensive and pretentious like all the New England beaches I had tried.  And once we gave his recommendation a try, our kids went there for years while they were growing up and now her mom was doing the same for her.

As I was telling her I could see she didn’t think it was that amazing a story.  But I wondered if in twenty or thirty years she might be reminded of this story while she was talking to one of her descendants.  Maybe she’d tell her kids about their crazy old great grandfather who told stories about even more ancient people and events and always made sure there was some extra rich ice cream available for dessert and always had time to push a kid on a swing, pick berries or provide a butterfly net for catching lightning bugs.

Yep, summer is reaching its crescendo.  A few more parties and outings and then fall and the great seasonal ritual of death.  The fall equinox and Halloween and battening down the hatches.  I see that Guillermo del Toro has a Frankenstein movie coming out in November.  Maybe I’ll give that a try.