Summertime
At the age of 13, that word already had special meanings for me. Summertime was a special time at The Lake, learning to do a back-flip from the tower Dad had built on the raft for us to play on, or rowing across The Lake to the store to get a dollar’s worth of gas to put in Bob’s dad’s 22-horse Evinrude. It meant rowing along the shoreline after dark by boat to Frog-Cove to find enough really fat frogs for Mom to fry up, or catching a big bass and a mess of blue-gills for dinner. It meant jumping into The Lake, fully clothed to chase a turtle – fully clothed, of course, meant no shoes, no hat, no shirt, only the same pair of dirty short pants that I had been wearing for a week.
Eventually, as with all summers, that one ended when school started in the fall. Sadly, that meant putting on shoes for the first time since June, along with long pants and a scratchy new shirt from JC Penney’s. I don’t remember the teacher, but I do remember the English language room as if it were yesterday – the polished terrazzo floor, the steel tilt-out windows, and the tall blackboard covered with chalk dust. The desks were the wood and cast iron kind that were connected together in rows, like trunk-to-tail elephants in a circus parade. I even remember the glass window in the classroom door. It was marbled, so you couldn’t see through it.
I think the teacher had probably just read a passage from Walden Pond or a Steinbeck novel or from some famous author who I had never heard of until that very moment. The poetry in the words reminded me of the freedom of summer, so when she called on me to explain how it made me feel, I said, “it’s like summer”. She frowned, and some of the other kids snickered. Seemingly she was hoping for a more sophisticated response, but I was no more or less sophisticated at 13 than I am now at 83.[i]See “Thank God I am not sophisticated”, coming soon. She was disappointed, the other kids were amused, and I felt humiliated.
Fast forward 50 years to a time when I had recently experienced a couple of life’s inevitable disappointments and a time for reflection and beginning to look inward for answers. I took some classes at the University of California, Santa Cruz campus in the Psychology department, read enough self-help books to fill a walk-in closet, and had seen a half dozen therapists before meeting Jane.
She was a petite Jewish lady from New York, well educated, kind and gentle but direct with her approach, and smart as a whip. She and I hit it off immediately and I continued to see her regularly for the many years that followed. She asked me one day to pick an emotion – any emotion – and talk about it. I was caught totally off-guard, unable to name a single one. She asked me what things caused me to get excited, and the only thing I could think of was a roller coaster. As we talked, I began to realize that I knew and felt all of the human emotions and feelings – I just couldn’t put names on them. We talked more about the Summertime experience of 50 years earlier, and it finally became clear that there was no reason for me to have felt humiliated that day. Instead, it was the frowning teacher who needed help.
Try as I might, I suppose I will never be able to listen to the Louis Armstrong & Ela Fitzgerald rendition of Summertime
without a box of Kleenex nearby.
“Summertime and the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high
Oh, your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’
So hush, little baby, don’t you cry…”
By: Jim
Written: December 7, 2024
Published: December 7, 2024
Revised:
footnotes
| ↑i | See “Thank God I am not sophisticated”, coming soon. |
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