Summer When I Was a Boy

Dear Monkey,

Yesterday I was making a delivery for my job at the music store and I visited an elementary school.  All of the kids were outside playing and having a picnic. It was the last day of school. This triggered a near-overwhelming wave of nostalgia in your dear old Daddy-o that he was not expecting. It got me to thinking about what things were like when I was a boy, and I thought I would write you a letter to tell you about it. I realize I could just tell you in person, but I'm not sure how much you'd understand right now, and I wanted to capture some of my thoughts.

When I was young, it was always summer or Christmas. I'm not sure how that happened or when it changed, but it is a fact. We didn't have autumn until I was in 7th grade, and thinking about that triggers a whole different set of emotions. And spring. Well, forget about spring. The very first spring happened when I was 13 and it was straight to adulthood after that. But when I was a young boy, all I remember were warm summer days and playing in snow drifts.

Maybe I'll tell you about our months-long Christmases another time, but I want to tell you about the summers we had, because it's summer now. Or it's close anyway.

Summer days in the 1970s were different than summer days now. There were only two types of weather: hot and thunderstorms. On the hot days, we would play in the woods or maybe go to the pool in town. Sometimes we would go to the lake — ours was called Little Beaver.

The woods behind my house — that's where your Nana lives now — held some of the most fascinating treasures back then. There were fossils, impressions of scaly dinosaur skin (indistinguishable from snake skin, except we knew it came from tyrannosaurs) and flora from when the Earth was young. There was a giant rock that we called Table Rock that had a small cave of sorts you could crawl into if you weren't too big. There were bits of wrecked automobiles from ancient civilizations and maybe pieces of an old house. I'm not sure where all that junk came from. We chewed tea berry leaves and peeled bark off of trees and dressed like red Indians and shot bows and arrows and cap guns.

Sometimes we'd go into the woods in front of the house that aren't there anymore. One time we took an old sheet and made a shelter by hanging it between some laurel bushes and we'd hide treasure there where no one could find it. Sometimes we'd go down to the creek or this little spring that used to come up in front of the house. There were giant crawdads under the rocks, as big as a man's hand, and big bullfrogs that were a foot around.

One time Daddy, your grandfather, discovered a bird's nest and showed it to me. He told me not to touch it and not to show it to Ricky Powers, our next-door neighbor, because he thought he would break the blue robin's eggs that were in them. Well, I did what any self-respecting five-year-old boy would do and immediately told Ricky about it. The next day I heard Daddy hollering for me in the yard and when I came to him, he pointed to the nest. All the eggs were broken. Then he took a belt and beat my ass with it.

I was spanked every other day when I was a child, but looking back, I should have been spanked every day. One time, when I was about three, I was playing in the house with my twin sister, your Aunt Sarah. She took an orange crayon and drew a large man on the wall in the hallway. Daddy found it and asked who did it and I told him the truth. I was a very honest boy, as you might well imagine, and quite righteous, too. I thought it was my duty to tell on your aunt. But do you know what she did? She said that I had drawn the big orange man on the wall! Can you believe that? Daddy said he didn't care who did and whipped us both with his leather belt. The lesson of this story: adults do not care about justice. Lesson #2: don't trust your Aunt Sarah.

Your grandfather made a swing set for us when were young. He built the frame from some sort of industrial pipe, sawed treated lumber for the seats, and hung them with heavy rope. Those swings lasted years. He also built a basketball goal, but since the property was on a hill, and the ground was grassy, the court wasn't much to speak of. I blame this for my foundering basketball career.

Daddy kept a slingshot and an air pistol beside his chair on the front porch, where he would sit smoking King Edward cigars. He would shoot at bluejays and cats, but I never saw him kill one. My bedroom window looked out on the porch and I could smell the sweet smoke and see the orange glowing tip of the cigar when I fell asleep on those summer nights.

There were a lot more stars back then. Scientists would probably tell me that I just can't see the stars as much now because we live in a city. I'm not sure about that. The moon seemed more intimate in those days, almost like it belonged to us. You could lay on the grass in the evening and look for four-leaf clover until it was too dark and then count hundreds of lightning bugs all over the yard. Then you stare up at the sky and pick out your favorite constellations. When I was a boy, everyone had a favorite constellation. Mine was Orion.

We also had these little worms in the grass that don't exist anymore. They looked like pale-green threads without any features at all. You would only see them if you stared into the grass for a long time. No one has seen them in years, because of course we are much too busy now to stare at grass.

Sometimes we would play games with the whole family. We played croquet, which is something people did in the 1970s. It was fun, but my favorite was lawn darts. These were very large steel darts that you would toss like horseshoes to try to land in a ring. When I was a boy, I loved to throw them high in the air above me to see how far they would go, then they would zoom to the earth and stick about six inches into the ground. I think they got banned because of little boys throwing them high into the air to see how high they would go and planting them in their sisters' heads.

Life was much more unpredictable back then.

Your Nana had to cook for Daddy, my four brothers and sisters, and me, which was a lot of food. On Saturdays, she would make big plates of hot dogs and cheeseburgers. Sometimes the cheeseburgers would come on buns, but usually they were on white bread that was grilled in butter. They were really delicious. And the grown-ups would put humongous slices of tomato and onion on theirs. They put onions on their hot dogs, too. Now that I'm a grown-up, I have to eat onions on my hot dogs and hamburgers, too.

Every summer Sunday after church, we always ate fried chicken. We all had special seats at the table and your grandfather sat at the head. I sat at the "foot" of the table, or opposite him. Mother sat to my right. We all had our favorite part of the chicken and that's what we got to eat. Mine was the leg. Your Nana ate the short leg. Somebody got the back, which your mom says isn't even a real piece, but she doesn't know about fried chicken because her people are not chicken people. We would get buttery mashed potatoes and deviled eggs and rolls and corn on the cob and either peas or lima beans, which were also really buttery. We also had cantaloupe and watermelon every day in the summer, and I would eat the watermelon down to the rind until I had a belly ache. Watermelons back then had seeds and that's how you grew new watermelons. I don't know how they grow new watermelons now.

We would pick blueberries or raspberries or wild blackberries to eat during the day. Or we'd pick strawberries that Mother and Daddy grew. Those were juicy, sweet berries as big as an apple. You can't grow strawberries like that anymore.

We ate candy back then, too, but our candy was different. During the summer we ate little candy dots that were stuck to paper and you had to pull them off and the paper would stick to the dots so you had to suck the paper off before you could really enjoy it. We ate push ups and dream sickles and wonderful grape popsicles.

The last day of school was officially the beginning of summer in the kid year. School was a lot more fun back then. We didn't have as many tests as they do now, and our teachers read stories to us everyday, and there was always time for crafts, and we played war ball. (Remember that life was much more unpredictable back then.) Because it was the 1970s, we also drew a lot of pictures of a rock band called Kiss, though none of us had ever heard any of their songs.

On the last day of school when I was in first grade, I tripped on the rubber mat going into the school and crashed my face into the metal post between the two front doors. Your Aunt Sandy had to take me to the hospital and I got stitches. The stitches were made of black thread and the doctor sewed them into my lip just like Nana would hem a pair of pants. Then Sandy took me to Burger Chef and then we hung out at Little Beaver for a little bit and then she finally took me back to Daniels Elementary, and I got back just in time to get ice cream before we all went home for the summer. The ice cream at school was always vanilla and it came in a little Styrofoam cup and you ate it with a little wooden paddle that tasted like a tongue depressor at the doctor's office.

The other time I got my lip busted was at summer recreation, which was this program they had at Daniels Elementary during the summer. I went for a couple of summers. One time I was hanging out with one of my friends, Chris Rissuci, and he was pretending to play guitar with an aluminum baseball bat, I guess because we didn't have any tennis rackets. He swung it behind himself and caught me right in the face. It chipped a tooth — a permanent tooth — and when Mother took me to Dr. Cincy, he mixed up a compound and made a bit of fake tooth to go on the chipped one.

Sometimes in the summer we would go see relatives, which meant a big car trip in the Cordoba. We drove over really curvy mountain roads to get to Logan or Mingo County. We would listen to music on the 8-track player and sometimes it would be rock and roll, like David Bowie, but sometimes it would be the Statler Brothers or Hank Williams. We would sing a lot during car trips, too, and your grandfather would sing songs from when he was a boy, like "Smile," or "The Little White Cloud That Sat Right Down and Cried." He loved to sing and I did, too.

If we went to Logan County, I always knew I was close to my grandmother's house when we rounded Three Mile Curve. There would be long-haired uncles there, wearing sleeveless undershirts and bell-bottom jeans, and there'd be more fried chicken, but they ate three-bean salad, which Mother didn't make at home. One of the uncles who didn't have long hair because he was older and worked in the mines had an above-ground swimming pool which was really something.

People looked different then, not just uncles. Everyone had long hair, but the men's hair was longer than the women's and the men had thicker sideburns. In the summer, we all wore tennis shorts that went up to your butt cheeks and long white tube socks to your knees that had colored stripes on them. All of the boys my age had haircuts like the Beatles unless their parents didn't believe in rock and roll and then they had crew cuts.

We would got to the city pool sometimes, but your old man doesn't swim very well, unlike your big brother and sister and your mom. But I still liked going, partly because of the smell. It smelled like chlorine and sun tan oil and this pizza they made that had crust that was like cardboard. I loved that pizza. I never went off the high dive because I was scared. Everyone was always playing their radios at the pool and you'd hear Olivia Newton John and the Steve Miller Band every time you went.

We'd go to the lake a few times in the summer, to fish and catch blue gill and throw them back or to feed stale bread to the ducks.  If we were with someone older, we might get to take a paddle boat onto the lake, which seemed like a real adventure.

Sometimes in the summer, if we couldn't go to the lake or the pool, we'd just put on our swim suits and spray each other with the garden hose out in the yard.  And we would run, really, really fast for a long time, just around the yard and around the house until we were too tired and then we would go inside and Mother, your Nana, would give a big glass bottle of Pepsi Cola.

A few times a week during the summer, there would be a great thunderstorm, nothing like the thunderstorms we have now. The rain would come in giant drops that sounded like drums when it hit the trees and the roof of the house. Sometimes we'd watch it from the porch and you could smell the rain, which smelled like 1970s rain that was warm and comforting, and sometimes we would run out in the rain and splash our bare feet in puddles in the yard. Everyone was barefoot in summer during the 1970s.

Just now I am thinking that I would like to see one of those old thunderstorms, and I would sit with you on the porch and you would smell it and could tell your son about it some day. But it's a warm, cloudless day, and you're down for your nap in your crib, so I am writing you this letter, so you will know why your old man acts the way he does and sometimes gets sad when it rains in the summer.

Sleep well.

Daddy.