Running Wild in the Summer

The neighborhood's so quiet with all the kids in various summer camps while their parents work. While parents slog away at jobs or housekeeping, the kids in my neighborhood are endlessly busy with exciting, stimulating, enriching activities. My own daughter is booked all summer long so that her folks can work and she can have fun outings and new experiences with old friends and new.

But when I was a kid, not all that long ago, huge blocks of summertime were my own to fill. From the age of six on, I was wandering all over the neighborhood on trike, bike, or foot, alone or with a friend, in and out of the houses and apartments of kids I hardly knew whose parents were sometimes around and sometimes not. If a pal and I wanted spending money, we'd walk a couple of blocks to the railroad track and gather some of the plentiful discarded empty glass bottles, as many as we could carry, then cash them in for the nickle a bottle deposit at the local liquor store. Everybody did this; all the kids were pretty much left to their own devices during summer, riding bikes far afield and only coming home for dinner.

Once in the liquor store with our found empties, a friend and I would loiter by the fan, sneak peaks at the girlie magazines until the guy behind the counter shooed us away, and turn in our new nickels for Pop Rocks or Popsicles in the 90+ degree California heat. Then we'd wander the neighborhood in filthy bare feet trying to eat our frozen treats before they melted down our shirtfronts. The asphalt would be so hot that it would melt onto our callused feet in little black patches, but by July our soles were so summer-hardened that we could walk across glass-sharp gravel along the railroad tracks without suffering.

A lot of summer was spent avoiding the heat. My town was in a hot East Bay Area valley which regularly got up into the 90s in summer, and went over 100 a few days each year. When it got hot enough, I'd lie on my grandparents' linoleum floor in front of the box fan, singing into the airflow two inches from the grille so that my voice was cut into a thousand tiny, vibrating, reverberating pieces of air. I'd get to drink lots of Cragmont colas and raid their bookcase while Grandpa watched the fights on TV in his undershirt and Grandma read lovely novels about British countryfolk like "How Green Was My Valley" or "To Serve Them All My Days" or "Goodbye Mr. Chips." I'd pore over books on North American birds or 20th century poets or whatever was at hand, and my mother would provide me with huge piles of novels and oversized coffee table books she'd get from the library to expand my world and tickle my visual sense. I remember books on Faberge eggs and classic cars, Michelangelo and Mozart, frogs and stars and the human body.

Mom was a high school teacher, and she'd borrow film strips from the school library over the summer and a film strip projector to view them with, and I'd have little film strip showings on the family room wall. She also borrowed school district musical instruments over the summers, so instead of languishing in a cupboard all summer until some vaguely bored adolescent checked them out for classes in September, I'd get to play with an accordion or a trumpet or a banjo. I never got very far with them, but it was magical to have a full-sized harp in the living room all summer and sit at it in an oversized peignoir set borrowed from my mother and strum it, pretending to be a fairy, and get sounds that weren't half-bad despite my lack of lessons.

There was always lots of music in the summers, since my mother was a fine pianist and accompanied all the high school's summer school musicals for years to make extra money during those long summers. I got to hang out with the teenagers and be let into the periphery of their lives, and I'd hang with the less-popular teens and be a sort of pet for them. I'd learn all the lines and all the songs to every musical, and sometimes I'd get to be an extra in the chorus. It was heaven. In the evenings, my mom and I would sit at the piano, and she'd sing harmony to my melody line and play the most intricate musical scores effortlessly. We'd read plays aloud together or drive to my aunt's house in the country 10 miles away so my mom and aunt could chat while I ran wild on their property until dusk.

Those summers were pretty wonderful.