I wish I wasn’t told as a kid to enjoy summer.
My dad had always said when I was growing up, just before locking my brother and I outside, that he missed summer as a kid.
He told us we’d look back, longing for the freedom and the irresponsibility that childhood summers brought with the warm weather and the green leaves.
Then he’d tell us to play outside for two, three hours, responding to objections with it’ll be good for you, and he’d shut the door.
Fireworks, loud music, ribs, lakes and water were staples of my childhood summers which, I realize now, were fragile and should, should have been savored.
They started, slowly, to be shorter — stolen — as I got older.
The first thief, a summer fling with deep eyes and soft lips, had swooped in, cold calling me in May while I was on a school trip in Washington D.C. He was an old friend — almost more, years before.
He was with his friends on the way to school — I was on a bus headed to Manhattan (I lived there at the time) — he told me he missed me, I believed him. He called me again days later, asking me out — we hadn’t spoken in years prior to our interaction on the bus. I explained to him I lived in New York now — he was from Western Washington — but I’d be spending my summer with my dad, who lived down the street from him.
When I arrived in Seattle a month later, I called him, and we set a day for our date.
I found myself three months later, on a non-stop to JFK, baffled at how short the summer had been.
The summer had flown by — wildly — in a romance-fueled blur of saltwater taffy, arcade games and mentos-in-cola explosions.
The next stolen summer wouldn’t be for a few years — I was about to graduate high school, and I was being rushed to the hospital. I had awoken in a hellish landscape — these scrubs don’t go with my eyes at all! – my ears ringing, the world drowned in a yellowish haze. The doctor had explained what happened — I nodded like I understood.
I felt my summer slipping through days sipping zofran and zolpidem.
Sorry, we’re going to need to take more blood, the nurse said too many times each day. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
I laid in the cold hospital bed, sleeping when the medicine worked and watching the news when it didn’t.
I was eventually discharged, though never quite escaping the world I had awoken to in the hospital. My summer — like my graduation gown — lay at my feet in rags.
I think Prince said it perfectly when he said All good things they say, never last, and love, it isn’t love until it’s past.
Summer is finite and short, leaving us as we age.
