AND THE LIVING IS EASY

In the early, fluttering, southern lady eyelids of summer mornings,  as the belly of the day begins to swell and gestate at the rate of a hummingbird, ready to give birth in a matter of minutes, when it is still so hushed quiet that I can hear my footsteps padding around the carpet like a heavy toddler’s and I’ve yet to say good morning to my perky roommate Keurig, I drift back.

The atmospheric vapor which bathed the night in a bassinet of stars lingers like the last splash gasp of Old English cologne which I used to apply with a soldier’s slap of vigor hours before a hopeful date, with its promise of soft curves and dreamy flesh and it intoxicates me with memory.  

Some are vivid.  Some are as distant as my mother’s congenial, throw-back-her-head-in-delight laugh which slowly, over her last few years of life, faded and finally extinguished like the light of an old gas lantern that used to illuminate the streets, just like she used to illuminate mine.

When our parents leave we are left to swim, without the benefit of lessons or lifeguards, in the pools of the shadows, fearing the depths, but challenged by the goal of getting, somehow, exhaustively, to the banks of safety.

There is something about summer mornings that is reminiscent of the now barely audible echo of my parents as they stood, with fists to chin and on the chalk boundary sidelines of ball fields, cheering on my efforts, no matter how spectacularly spastic or untalented, which infused me with the absolute conviction that I could, if I wanted to, sprout like a giant if I suddenly felt the need.  Today that ability seems quaint and naive.  Charming.  But in the day, it was the irrepressible source of my undeniable power which in turn lit up the skies of my imagination with a million and one watts of Las Vegas strip power.  

The days of summer feel like the  work of a group of faceless MIT scientists, who, following centuries of dogged research, finally figured out the algorithm of loneliness and applied everything that they had discovered to the start of each test tube simmering day until the entire experience of living, between the months of June and September, felt every bit as sumptuous as a Bernstein conducted performance of Rhapsody in Blue.

There are musical notes seeded in the dew-drenched silence of summer whose songs burst like a magician’s bouquet of flowers and what we feel is as every bit as moving and profound as anything else Gershwin banged out on a Tin Pan Alley piano.

Somewhere out there, deep within the lover’s arms of summer boughs, birds whistle, just like my dad did whenever he’d walk in the house.  It was a gentle chirp, a nesting chirp, whose dynamic frequency has not diminished even though it has been over forty years since I heard it.

God can take away breath, claiming ownership, but the whistle always belongs to us.

Spring awakens us, Fall helps us crawl beneath the cloudy duvet bed of winter but summer is a just arrived au pair, who despite her giant, claps of thunder and heat filled threats, has all the time in the world to make things right.

Time in the summer is far less significant and demanding than during any of the other seasons.  

Daylight acts like it’s come down with a mean case of affluenza, blithely dismissing the rules of order.  

Like the Fitzgeralds, the sun, which also rises for the alcoholic spirit of Hemingway, are the first to arrive at the party and the very last to leave.  You half expect flappers and drunks to suddenly appear and Charleston their way straight into the Gatsby deep end, fully clothed and as drunk as a poet teetering on a bar stool, aiming for the mercy of the floor.

It is a time for gaiety and fanfare, for parades and Souza marches, but it is also a time for hurricanes and oppression.

The elements in seconds can become our sworn enemy and destroy everything that is in its raging path.

The rich get to sail away while swilling their designer tequila while bragging about their house seats for Springsteen on Broadway,  but as for the rest of us, we peasants are the ones who stand to gain the most from summer’s egomaniacal indifference because it constantly reminds us that despite our pangs for elusive love,  despite the casualties who we mourn for every single day, despite the despair and feelings of helplessness that we feel  every time we are reminded how orphaned we are, summer arrives, with satan’s heat, to remind us that despite its unsolicited wrath that, despite the beginnings and end that we fear, we still somehow stand as tall as the stalks of an Oklahoman cornfield.

We are wired to have faith. To be resilient despite the odds.  

To believe most what we can see the least.  

Because simply imagining and/or envisioning is every bit as potent as having what you want the most.  

We do not have to have proof to feel the power of our own convictions any more than we have to prove our own worth.

Because we know.

Our parents knew. 

The stars know.

The moon, which longs for us just as much as we long for it, knows. 

No one has to ask the moon why it is there.

It just is.

No one has to ask why you need to dance or sing or curl your toes beneath the sand.

You just do.

The end of the day, during the summer months, feels like a moment of formal surrender as the treaty between the warring generals of day and night is signed as the stampeding troops arrive like the cavalry, across the sky, wiping out any remaining signs of the enemy flag of color and light.

The sun, a worthy adversary,  dies at its own hand, with grace and dignity and just like that the battle is both won and lost.  It is up to you to decide whose side you are on.

The nights of summer are even more potent than the day because that is when you feel the full power of memory, of not only the events of the day but the events of your entire life.

Our past, every single moment of it, is still out there, as turbulent or as gentle as the ocean. 

 It lies deep within its depths.  Waiting for you.

The sound of your laughter, at any age, still rolls with the tides.

The sound of your mom’s stern warnings or your dad’s laughter at his own jokes tumbles in the waves.

The serpentine path you once swam, when you darted like a guppy in between your dad’s scrawny sunburned legs, is still there.

The cigar smoke that plumed like a smokestack high above his furrowed brow still floats like a cloud above his mythical still etched in sand presence.

It’s all still there.

All of it.

Forever.

On a summer night.