A man in late middle age recalls the many magical moments
of boyhood summers spent out-of-doors, and inside the wondrous worlds of
books.
Memories of Thanksgiving and winter�s sacred days are the
stuff of snapshots, of family gatherings around the bounty of the communal
table � beside the hearth � beneath the tree.
Summertime memories, though, are the stuff of long-form
films, played out slowly in the mind�s screening room � of warm rain and
cooling shade � of hot sandy beaches gently slapped by foamy saltwater � of
chilly entries into the chlorinated blue of neighborhood pools � of the
hypnotic throaty hum of tree frogs in the sticky blackness beyond the window
screen � of the tang of fresh-mowed grass � of the enveloping warmth rising
from blacktop after a thunderstorm � of bright blue mornings of outdoor play
� of hot, hazy afternoons reading a book, chosen not by a teacher but by the
reader � of relief over the school year past and anxious curiosity about the
school year ahead � and mostly, of the long sweep of time stretching to the
horizon, and the magical moments that lay ahead in this limitless green
landscape.
Summertime is magical, especially for the young and
surely at least in memory for those of a certain age. For one late
middle-aged man, memories abound of summers as a boy in the 1960s, with time
spent absorbed in the wondrous worlds summoned and shared by the late Ray
Bradbury, a gifted storyteller who passed away in 2012 at age 91.
The boy in question spent long afternoons, and sometimes
long beyond the midnight hour, devouring the pocket-sized, drugstore
paperbacks of Bradbury�s works, delighting in the awesome, sometimes awful,
but always exhilarating realms they recounted. His boyhood summer Bradbury
list returns to mind without prompting. The Martian Chronicles. Fahrenheit
451. The Illustrated Man. I Sing the Body Electric! Something Wicked This
Way Comes. And his favorite all-time summer read: Dandelion Wine. This
latter classic�s opening passage opens our ode to summertime, as we offer a
few excerpts from literary works that describe and celebrate this magical
season.
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with
darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had
the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You
had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the
first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
� Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, 1957.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves
growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that
familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
� F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925.
Summer on the land is spring completed and fall in the
making, time in both its strange dimensions.
� Hal Borland, Homeland: A Report from the Country, 1969.
Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can
happen to quiet people. For those few months, you�re not required to be who
everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance
to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don�t have the
rest of the year. You can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no
past. Summer just opens the door and lets you out.
� Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, 2005.
�Come with me,� Mom says. �To the library. Books and
summertime go together.�
� Lisa Schroeder, I Heart You, You Haunt Me, 2008.
Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.
� George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones, 1996.
[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days,
of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and
football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was
something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year�s
mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.
� Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose, 1971.
