ENDLESS SUMMERS

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

     The night above the dingle starry,

          Time let me hail and climb

     Golden in the heydays of his eyes 

The summer of 2023 has flown by in a flash . . . going. . . going, almost gone, now at the end of August (die she must). Once there were endless summers.

    I do not have any vivid memories of summers after having moved from the city when I was 10 years old, not like the ones I have of the summers of the 1950s. There was no anticipation of endings, just living in the summer "daze." And so my mind drifts back at this time of year, like remembering a beloved book I was sad to see come to an end. 

    All was contentment in the familiar, and delight in the wonder of being a child. In short, it was the opposite of Thomas Hobbes’ assessment of life without “awe.” Childhood is a time of awe, not time for assessment; ideally it is a time for living without care, unaware of the chaos and evils of the world, of suffering humanity, and fearful of danger or death. Life then was rife with simple pleasures and discovery waiting just below the surface of everything. Like Thoreau, I go a-fishing in the stream of that time and pull out the stuff of what are now treasured memories.

    Life was lived outdoors from morning until night, no TV during the day, if at all, or any other screens to distract from the work of childhood, which is play, and just "being," lying in the cool grass gazing at the wispy clouds passing around the world, or at the sparkle of stars. 

    Ours was the only single, detached house on the block with a green fence in the front of our house, which gave it a stately appearance compared to the stoops on the other narrow row homes There were blue hydrangea (we called them snowballs) on either side of the gate. Our backyard was a theatre in which we enacted house keeping, sailing on pirate ships, flew with Peter Pan and the Darling children. We played ball, tag, jacks, or invented new games on the spot. Our backyard was alternatively a classroom for observation of nature, with shrubs, a flower garden and a taller-than-our-house cherry tree. That tree was refuge from sun and rain, and a lesson in the seasons. There was not much greenery in the otherwise little crowded hill town outside of Philadelphia proper. It was all I knew or needed of the great outdoors. And it was lovely.

In springtime, fragrant white blossoms burst forth on our tree. We proudly brought blooming branches to the May Day procession at St. Lucy’s church on Green Lane. The petals fell like snow showers, fluttering in the air, drifting blocks away and scattering on sidewalks like confetti. 

    When my sister and I visited the old neighborhood 30 years later, we found the garden and yard were cemented over, and the tree was gone.

    Was our world really that small?  

    No! That house, that street, that tree, and the endless summers of play were a boundless and beautiful world I adored, living in my mind and heart all the years since. 

When evening came on, we would listen for the circus-like tune blasted from Rodeo Joe’s ice cream truck, with a cowboy on a bucking bronco painted on the side. Favorite treats were water ice, fudge pops or orange creamcicles.  Neighbors were out on their stoops for the evening. Mrs. Pickel would buy an ice cream cone for her dog, Midnight, and feed it to him on her front stoop. Mr. Wheeler, a former boxer, would chain smoke cigarettes and watch the world go by.

         Sometimes my father would send my sister and me to Jack's Pharmacy and Soda Fountain at the corner of Baker and Gay under the El for for ice cream for the family. Walking back the short distance up the hill, carrying a bouquet of cones covered over with wax paper, we licked our own dripping cones, arriving with sticky butter pecan, chocolate and orange sherbet fingers.

After sundown, it was all street games with neighborhood children. We clapped and cheered when the streetlights came on, the signal for the revels to begin: hide and seek, card games of go fish and rummy on the warm sidewalks, jump rope with accompanying songs to keep the rhythm:

           Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn around

   Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch the ground

    Truth or Dare was a game of choice: answer a question or carry out a dare. Once a shy boy, who was usually too sick to come out to play, chose a dare, and was lowed into a city culvert by two other boys! Learning to roller skate and to ride a bike on our steep hill was thrilling and dangerous, resulting for some of us in May though August bumps, bruises and scabbed over knees. 

    

    Where were our parents? 

    No one had a swimming pool, but on the sweltering days of summer, an adult would take a wrench and open the nearest fire hydrant. Then, a flood of gushing cool water and a riot of children splashing in the water flowing into the cobblestone street below the curb, where children sent leaves, sticks or paper boats down the stream—our very own creek in the city! 

On a occasion when the neighborhood kids did became aware of a recurring danger, we would scrambl to duck on the side of a stoop or into an alleyway to avoid being hit by the car of Nick Caruso. He was my father's cousin, who, already inebriated, would periodically make rounds to people he knew asking for a shot of whiskey. Then he would get into his car (we had already taken cover), and make his reckless way up our street, swerving onto the sidewalk from time to time. It was exciting and frightening, but also funny, and we nervously laughed at the sight. I think the older kids knew it was sad too, for him, and for us to have seen it.    

    At the glimmer of the first star in the twilight sky, it was:

    Star light, star bright,  

            first star I see tonight,

      I wish I may, I wish I might

            have the wish I wish tonight.

I don't remember what I wished for back then (when I still believed wishes came true). I suppose my wishes changed over time. In my earlier years, I may have wished for more ice cream. Then later, waiting at the green gate, I wished the boy with the Elvis hair would notice me as he walked down our street each afternoon. He never did.

We played outside well into evening until we heard our mothers' call, “Come in now. It’s getting late.” On steamy summer nights, after tub baths (never heard of showers or air conditioners), my sister and I roasted in our second floor bedroom, with just a fan at the window. We talked and giggled, about what I haven’t a clue, until my father would yell up the stairway, “Don’t make me come up there. Be quiet now, and go to sleep.” 

We eventually did settle down, without stuffed animals, without stories read to us, without being tucked in—all of which we did with our children and grandchildren years later--no worse for the lack thereof, our having experienced magical moments now lost in the mists of "once below a time."(1) And through our window we could see the moon rising, and the last few fireflies, or hear the crickets' lullaby in late August, “so thin a splinter of singing."(2) We said prayers “to the close and holy darkness,” (3) and drifted off to sleep.

                                               Time held me green and dying

                                            Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Quotes at beginning and end from Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill

1. Dylan Thomas from "Fern Hill”

2. Carl Sandburg from “Splinter"

3. Dylan Thomas from” A Child's Christmas in Wales”