I once believed no one ever died in summer. I thought if a loved one could just make it through the year until the hot months came, they could not die. Summer was tinged with immortality. I believed it right until the time my mother passed away a few years ago in the midst of the July heat.
Summer has always meant baseball to me even in this football-crazy town. I grew up rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers. I marked the years of my youth as a failure or a success by how the Dodgers fared. Summer is real life at reduced speed. It is as if life put its DVD player on slow-mo. Summer was the schoolyard where we played games with deadly seriousness and high drama. The wiseguys with slicked-back hair and taps on their shoes would invade our schoolyard on Sundays for their crap games. We were innocent spectators as these guys cursed and chatted about stuff we could barely understand. They drank beer out of paper bags and kept an eye out for the cops. We wanted them to leave so our schoolyard would go back to the make-believe big-league stadium of our dreams. The wiseguys owned our Sundays in the summertime.
The meaning of summer changes as you get older. Baseball got crowded out by girls. The schoolyard was left for new kids. There is nothing more lonely than a guy hanging on a corner, watching all the girls go by.
The draft hung over our heads when we graduated. Some joined the Reserves where they only had to serve six months of active duty. I wound up in the Air Force. Come summer, I was stationed at Gunter Air Force Base near Montgomery, Ala. In 1961, they called the town the "Cradle of the Confederacy." Maybe they still do. It seemed like a nice enough place. Folks would give an airman a lift to and from town and sometimes invite you to dinner. The girls were friendly, too, in the way girls who love uniforms always are.
It all changed one weekend. We had a pass and had driven to Panama City, Fla. It was a college town back then, where the kids from Auburn, Texas, and Alabama liked to raise some hell. For a few bucks, we had a cottage on the beach, a bottle of vodka and some college girls who showed a little interest. We were bathing in the afterglow of a fine weekend and heading back to the base when we got the news.
We had stopped at a golfing range to hit some balls when the owner told us about it. Apparently the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was barricaded inside a Baptist church in the middle of Montgomery. All military had been ordered back to the base. We left in a hurry.
As fate would have it, we wound up on the very street where Dr. King was under siege. U.S. Marshals carrying guns crossed the street right in front of our car. That’s when the tear gas started. We sped away, leaving behind fumes and chaos.
We all wound up confined to the base during the following tension-filled weeks. The friendly folks that had been inviting us to dinner and giving us rides were off limits because they weren’t feeling so friendly anymore. The Alabama girls must have found civilians to flirt with. The Montgomery newspaper printed editorials lambasting the "Freedom Bus Riders." The Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan wrote a long letter to the editor denouncing the liberal interference in the ways of the South. Paul Harvey delivered nasty radio commentaries against the attempt to integrate the public facilities of the South. After that, I always saw Harvey as a closet racist. That’s the way summer ended, with the scent of magnolias getting a little toxic.
My summers afterward were less dramatic. They were still mostly about girls, the joy of finding someone you thought was special and the pain of finding out it wasn’t so. Summer music is the soundtrack of most of our lives. The haunting clarinet of Mr. Acker Bilk playing "Stranger on the Shore" became my theme song of lost love as I wallowed in self-pity.
Then one season I met somebody who didn’t grow tired of me. Summers after marriage and kids are pretty conventional, the meaning of the Shore especially so. No longer the stranger on the Shore. It’s the Boardwalk and amusement rides and cotton candy and aching feet. The glory of the stable life. The stuff of which family memories are made.
Still, there’s something about those early summers in life, the mystery of the soft, lonely nights when the heat waves are shimmering off the sidewalks and just a couple of notes from Mr. Acker Bilk were enough for you to feel the promise and the pain of the human condition.
