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Opinion Column
For the week of August 9 through 15, 2000

Savor summer before it slips away into a wistful memory

Commentary by JOELLEN COLLINS


I love summer. I love the way it has everybody outside. In fact, I long for more front porches and neighborhood stops where one can greet someone and just chew the fat.


In reviewing poetry for a class I will be teaching, I ran across one of my favorite lines of poetry, Emily Dickinson’s memorable phrase: "As imperceptibly as grief, the summer lapsed away." How grief effects each of us is a topic for another column, but I can’t help but think of this line every time someone asks me, "How’s your summer?" or, "Having a good summer?"

They probably want me just to say, "Fine," or "Great," as I would to the usual greeting "How are you?" Nonetheless, I am tempted to tell them more than they really want to hear about how my summer is going. Because, the truth is, I’m wasting time mourning its passing even as it slips away from my grasp. It’s simply going to fast.

I love summer. I love the way it has everybody outside. In fact, I long for more front porches and neighborhood stops where one can greet someone and just chew the fat.

In my family’s small home in Burbank, Calif., much of our life was spent outdoors, especially when the days were San Fernando Valley hot and the nights cool, often causing tussles when mom wanted me to take a sweater.

Even though the climate permitted our being allowed outside most of the year, still summer was the time when Mr. Adams down the street would bring out several watermelons and let as many kids as possible run down to his small clapboard house and gorge on the crispy cold slices. He was an old man; and I often think of him as the grandfather I never experienced having in my family. At least he was the generous and loving grandpa I fantasized about as a child. Or there were the endless games of "kick-the-can" and "hide and go-seek" and the usual softball attempts on our too-narrow street.

Later, when my own young family was growing up in Malibu, we also spent most of our summers outside. I often counted eight to 10 neighborhood kids backhanding balls against the side of our house, exploring the creek nearby, building forts on the hill below our deck, or terrorizing us mothers with their too-speedy skateboard runs down the steep street of our block.

It was idyllic in retrospect; now I find that summer here stimulates the feelings I got then when going barefoot and wiggling our toes in tall grasses were the order of the day.

As a grownup with no kids at home, I experience different pleasures, of course. I appreciate the rampant beauties of our mountains, letting my dogs run free in the wilderness away from cars and constraints, the sounds of the summer symphony in the early evening, eating outside and thus somehow feeling more friendly and casual at the same time, or even just walking whenever I feel like it without having to load up with the right gear. A lot like going barefoot in California.

The only trouble with all this, and yet the thing which makes it even more precious, is that there really isn’t enough summer for someone like me to experience here. I have to pack it all in. I feel guilty if I don’t.

Last week a friend and I were floating a very low and mild stretch of river near Stanley. As we relished the slight breeze off the cool river, giggling at our attempts to steer the kayaks, we asked ourselves why we haven’t done this every summer and, in fact, more this summer. The easy answer, of course, is that we work and have responsibilities and find the time just slips away…as imperceptibly as grief. One day it’s more a memory than a reality.

And it is a human fault to take what is right by us for granted. There were weeks when I didn’t get down to the ocean just one-half mile from our home on Serra Road in Malibu. There are weeks here, even in the summer, when I will walk my tried and true trails instead of exploring some of the less-traveled hikes nearby.

Ray Bradbury wrote a delightful and poignant story called "All Summer in a Day" about kids who are living on another planet where it rains solidly all the time. Only once every seven years, for just a few minutes, the rain stops and the sun shines.

The kids are readying themselves for that day and are irritated with a new arrival to the planet who has come from earth and remembers what it feels like to have the sun’s warmth. In a fit of ignorant pique, the kids lock her in a closet while they go out to play for those precious minutes before the rain returns.

Only when they come back in the classroom with the fresh memory of the kiss of the sun on their cheeks do they realize the terrible thing they have done to their classmate. It hits them with a terror how cruel they have been.

Sometimes I feel like I have to treat my beautiful summers here as if I will never experience them again, savoring every joy and flower and smell of barbecue as though it were my last. Otherwise, I might, in a sense, miss all of it just as did the unfortunate child in Bradbury’s story.

 

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