Summer...Way Back Then, Way Back When...

A few weeks ago, someone suggested to me that I write about the shortness of summer. This caught me by surprise, since I had just spent a "spring" day in the city, on which people were passing out in the subways and on the streets from the unseasonable heat and humidity. I had had the distinct impression that the "new" winter lasted through baseball's Opening Day snow, far into April, to be immediately followed by a new, longer summer.

The season previously known as spring had gone the way of mortgages requiring repayment.

In other words, we had a summer that had outgrown its calendar boundaries whether we had wanted one or not. I, for one, do not celebrate this development, but in order to comply with the editorial request, I dipped deeply into memory's recesses to the delightful endless summers of the past. And so my thoughts drifted once more Way Back Then, Way Back When...

...you placed your new pair of Keds at the foot of the bed, and gained a supernatural ability to wake up early all by yourself as soon as the last day of school had passed. The streets were quiet in the early morning and dew hung on the windshields of the parked cars, things you never noticed on your way to school.

...The Giants were in Manhattan, the Dodgers were in Brooklyn, the Twins were the Senators, the A's were in Kansas City, Braves in Milwaukee and the Red Sox were just another team playing a Sunday afternoon double-header at the Stadium.

...you could wear a seersucker or linen suit into the city and most days have a reasonable chance of not expiring on the street or in the subway, and did not need to have the linings removed or have the trousers cut into shorts...

... the best tennis was lawn tennis, in which the white  ball, slowly turning green, could bounce this way and that, requiring creative and savvy players and favored those who risked rushing the net to volley in order to avoid too many bounces, rather than the baseline ball smashers of today who favor the perfect corporate bounce every time. Ho-hum.

...reading was something that many young people did all year long, but perhaps even more in summer, on their own, unrelated to a course, a test, or any other person's requirements and was certainly not meant to "improve" them, prepare them for banking careers, or make each one a much better person than their friends...

...you took a typing course, instead of Mandarin; flipped burgers by the pool, instead of interning; played games without coaches, schedules, recruiters, and most assuredly parents, who, if you returned home before 5 or 6 pm after a day on your own outside gave you a funny look that said, "What are you doing here?"

...you were full of energy, all day, and yet you cannot remember having eaten a single "healthy" thing for lunch, ever. In fact, you cannot actually remember ever eating lunch at all, nor can any of your friends, although you still get a certain glowing feeling when passing by the baloney at the deli counter in the grocery...

...it was entirely possible to buy some real estate in Alaska or Florida before leaving the house in the morning simply by tearing off the coupon on the side of the cereal box and having mom mail it. You probably still own that square foot just outside Fairbanks or under some busted condo off Alligator Alley...

...there was a breeze on most evenings, when you went out again to play with friends, and you might have worn a shetland sweater around your shoulders and actually put it on once in a while. I am not making this up, even though you cannot possibly wear a shetland today even on most winter days and cannot even wear merino at night in summer, except occasionally at the shore...

...we could locate lemon or cherry italian ices without using mapquest at any paper store or pizza parlor, we "went" for ice cream to Jahn's or frozen custard at Carvel, and could take a seat at the pharmacy, like Schmidt's or Sutton Hall and have an ice cream soda, a malt, or a banana split and they also sold some drugs...

...it was entirely possible to play a game of stickball at P.S. 144 in the morning, stoopball in the afternoon, and top it off with a wiffle ball game in early evening without getting a single text from your parents asking how you were doing...

...and it was possible to invent your own game called cupball, using scrunched-up paper cups from the snack bar at the beach and pieces of fencing, played underneath cabanas with full line-ups whose names and positions you can still remember, and to emerge in August nearly as pale as you looked when the season began in late June, and your mothers marveled at this ability to disappear and they were perfectly happy, not worrying that this might hold you back in some way from acceptance to college or advancement in a lucrative career in which you could not explain what you really did in a sentence or less, except that it involved being in the vicinity of a whole bunch of money...

...way back when, way back then...

Ed Note: PS 144, Schmidt's and Sutton Hall pharmacies were located near Forest Hills Gardens, NY. Only PS 144 remains today. We could have also noted the fine stickball games played at our alma mater  (K through K) PS 101, located inside the Gardens' confines; it still stands as well, which says something about public education relative to drugstore economics, but we're not exactly sure what it means.