By Wayne Allensworth
In the summertime of my boyhood memories, time moved slower and each day was a discovery. The shadows were gobbled up quickly in the hazy, humid mornings. In those days, houses were around us, but at a bit of distance. In many cases, the yards were big and lots of what you might call “natural areas” were within the view from our front porch, where we hand-cranked homemade ice cream that had the flavor of almond extract in its vanilla goodness. I still favor vanilla, but the texture and flavor of that porch-made ice cream can’t be matched by the store bought, as my parents used to say. We took turns cranking, and like all small, communal ventures in those days, it became an event that included my grandparents and sometimes neighbors.
The great Ella Fitzgerald sings Summertime (George Gershwin/Dubose Heyward), a dreamy version that captures the deliciously sweet melancholy of summertime memories:
There was a house across the street that belonged to Mr. and Mrs. George. Their immaculate black-on-white 1957 Chevy sat regally in their driveway, which was gravel, as was ours for many years until we went uptown and paved it. The chrome on that car gleamed like the front of a jukebox, which is what the stylized cars of those days looked like to me, moving jukeboxes.
Next to and directly across from us were fields and wooded areas covered with scrubby oak trees. A group of kids from the area once dug a network of tunnels in the field next to our house, each foxhole-like entry/exit from the subterranean hive a “fort” in our minds. We were always building “forts,” but I guess Daddy and a couple of other men in the area decided that the tunnels were too risky even for those days when parents weren’t so concerned about absolute safety. So, they caved in our tunnels and ruined our forts. It was a sad day as I remember, watching from our front porch. Daddy built us a wooden fort in our backyard.
Summertime was for exploration. Our expeditions sometimes felt like voyages of the great discoverers of the Age of Exploration. The shell and gravel roads around us led to horse stables and pastures and in one case, over on Peppermill, not far from Jack Rabbit Road, stood an abandoned house. It even had a second story which was unusual for us. Our small house barely made a footprint in the landscape, but the gabled windows in that house ignited our already active imaginations. Stories of who had lived there and what terrible fate they had met floated around for years, sort of like the tales of the Goat Man we told one another and believed with all our hearts.
A jazzy, upbeat version of Summertime by Eva Cassidy. Her version evokes the movement of summertime, of spreading your wings to fly, of taking to the sky. But ‘til that day, nothing can harm you with Momma and Daddy standing by:
Once, we rode our bikes all the way to Addick’s dam, past Bear Creek, the very edge of our world. But for boy-me, even a trip far down our street, Bauer Drive, named after the family of rice farmers who had owned a lot of the land in Spring Branch, seemed like a journey. My bike had a “banana seat” and high, arching handlebars like a chopper motorcycle. The top-of-the-line bike in those days was a ten speed, but that was something we could only imagine then.
I would ride down the street, dodging potholes and waiting at crossroads stop signs, a passage that seemed as dangerous as a railroad crossing to me, because you actually had to look both ways and make sure a car wasn’t coming. Even a few cars seemed like a lot of traffic. In the summertime, I would ride past the stop sign and through a tunnel of great live oaks at the end of Bauer. Trees with wide canopies that made a leafy umbrella over the asphalt. And then the big curve of Campbell Road came into view, and I knew that through the great wall of trees beyond it was a driveway that led back to my friend Mark’s house. It all seemed mysterious, even wonderous to me. The things that were out of sight.
Riding my bike could be like time traveling. Down the street was Mr. Hillendahl’s house and his garden plot. He worked in the garden and had a field he used to plow with a mule. An older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Baylor, lived next door to us. Mr. Baylor had once worked at the Houston Zoo in Hermann Park and his house was full of zoo memorabilia from that time. Viewing his zoo collection became a safari in my imagination. When Mr. Baylor couldn’t mow his lawn anymore, I mowed it for him. The old man wore a broad-brimmed hat and carried a cane. He followed me closely and pointed at spots I had missed. He wasn’t shy about that. He showed me how to push the mower with my legs and bodyweight so I wouldn’t tire out too quickly. Like I said, the yards were big. Afterward, I might get a hamburger prepared by Mrs. Baylor, garnished with some of her homemade pickles, which were thick, sharply vinegary, and crunchy, not the thin slices you got at hamburger stands.
Our mothers used to warn us about the “heat of the day,” but that didn’t stop us from going outside. Sunburn was a great hazard. I was fair skinned, so Momma told me to keep my shirt on. But the glare of the summer sun was a welcome sight for me, as I always thought of summer as my time of year. The long days and the lightning bugs at dusk. It seemed dreamlike at times. We tended to shrug off the heat as our parents did. We worked outside in the yard, played and drank water out of hoses. We let the water run a little before we drank, as it was hot at first. You learned those things. For much of my boyhood years, we had a well, and I remember how strange “city water” tasted to me.
In the early days, Daddy mowed, but we kids got stuck with edging, which meant squatting in the grass and using a hatchet to chop along the edge of Momma’s flowerbeds, then pulling the thick St. Augustine grassroots, which seemed like steel cables at times, out of the dirt. And we had to do the job right. As Daddy made it clear, he did not appreciate a halfa**ed job.
Our yard seemed vast to me, and we had all manner of trees that my parents had planted when Daddy built our little house. We had great live oaks and elms and mimosa trees and pecan trees that yielded great numbers of sweet and oily pecans. We used buckets to gather them when they fell, then sat in the living room to crack them open to eat them. Making a perfect crack yielding two unbroken pecan halves was an accomplishment. My father was the real expert with the nutcracker. I still love pecans.
During the day we might be in the backyard helping Momma with the clothes. We had those wooden clothes pins they used then to latch garments on a long clothesline. I enjoyed watching the clothes flap in the breeze as they dried. If the wind was strong enough, I’d run through them like great curtains on a stage. Momma carried out the clothes basket and began hanging up the freshly-washed clothes, and my brothers and I might help, though we found other uses for the clothes pins, like making rubber band guns to shoot at one another. Momma made some of our clothes when we were small. She cooked and cleaned and sowed and did the laundry. Sometimes, she pressed us into service if we weren’t smart enough to get out of the house before the cleaning started. But it was a small house. The planks of the hardwood floors popped at night, especially in summertime. I was a sleepwalker, so my parents could hear when I was up, and one time they caught me walking down the driveway on some summer night. Where did I imagine I was going?
On Sundays, we might be off to our grandparents’ houses. Both sets lived nearby. At Meemaw and Grandad’s house, on Casa Loma, a dirt and gravel road, we sat on the back porch and ate watermelon. And we would get wet and sticky from it while Meemaw fried chicken. Grandad had a sweet tooth, and when he drank his sun tea from a tall, wide glass a dune-sized glob of sugar shifted in the bottom. He would stir it with an iced-tea spoon, and the dune gradually would take shape once more and he’d stir it again. The house sat upon cinder blocks, as so many of the houses did in those days, and I would walk across the floor just so I could sense the subtle vibration in my steps. Grandad had a vast vegetable garden, and he would share his tomatoes and cucumbers with us. He dug a fishpond and filled it with goldfish. Daddy decided to follow suit, and soon there was a pond near the glass door at the back of my parents’ bedroom and for a while a garden near Daddy’s tool shed. My maternal grandparents had a big garden in their backyard with corn stalks and tomatoes and other vegetables. Pawpaw liked to show us when he had a particularly big tomato or cucumber or squash growing out there. Nanny wore a straw hat with a brim so wide it looked like an umbrella when she was out there with him. They did everything together. They all made wine from white grapes that grew on their fences.
On Casa Loma Sundays, sometimes I sat in the living room with Grandad, where he kept a wooden chest that held his books. We traded books and read together. He traded books at a second-hand bookstore on Longpoint. When we had both read one collection of books, he took them there to get new ones. When we were reading, sometimes he stopped, adjusted his glasses and told me a story, usually about the Old West or his family history. Civil War soldiers and cowboys, sheriffs and outlaws and Comanches and Apaches. I would ask him about Frank James, who had hunted with his then-Sheriff father, and about Geronimo when Granddad saw him at Ft. Sill so many years ago. I’d heard the stories before, but I asked him anyway. Summertime was often story time.
Those were days when I wasn’t self-conscious of experience. I just soaked it in and lived it in a manner that was fully present, and you could savor the experience. Summertime. It was before you started trying too hard to chase something, which always meant that it fled from you, staying just ahead on the event horizon. It seemed like what you sought would find you if you stopped looking too hard. It was like having some word or name on the tip of your tongue, but trying too hard to remember didn’t help, it just ran away from you. So, you learned to let go of it and then at some unexpected a-ha! moment, it would come to you. And it was like working with Daddy in the summer heat and wielding a hatchet or shovel and him telling you that you were trying too hard, just relax and move. And that was summertime then. You just relaxed and moved.
In the summer, we stayed up late after the ten o’clock news and watched the Late Show, even the Late, Late Show if something really good was on. Maybe John Wayne or Gary Cooper or Erroll Flynn. I loved the Marx brothers and Laurel and Hardy. We brought pillows and blankets to the living room and sat in front of that big TV with the big clunky knob for turning channels, and antennae wrapped in tin foil. And sometimes we drifted off to sleep, then we’d wake up and watch some more and go back to sleep. And if I was still awake, I listened to Perry Como sing the Lord’s Prayer with those images of clouds and rays of sunlight streaming through the picture on that oval screen. And then the TV station signed off. Then there was a test pattern on the screen until early morning. Summertime was late nights and wonderful old movies that weren’t really all that old then.
There are a lot of summertimes in Willie Nelson’s gritty nasal voice. This version of Summertime signals the passage of time. His voice floats, quivers, and cracks like the summer haze:
Now it’s summertime again. I’m retired, so in the morning I drink my coffee and walk around the neighborhood. I notice things. We wonder why we don’t know our neighbors and there are a lot of reasons for that. One of them is that these houses don’t have front porches. They have automatic garage doors in front and people raise them up and leave and they raise them up and park inside and close them. And you barely see them. It’s like we are hiding from each other. Atoms in our self-contained worlds. But on my frequent walks, I’ve become acquainted with some of the neighbors who have grown used to my strolling by and that’s a good thing. Summertime was always a good time for friendship.
This morning, I was walking and had circled the block and when I came around the corner near our house, I saw a woman in a broad-brimmed summer hat. She was squatting on the sidewalk in front of a carriage and singing a nursery rhyme to a baby. She made broad gestures with her hands and clapped and sang with heart and feeling and didn’t pay any attention to me at all. So, I stood there just a moment and watched and smiled. And then I went home.
The summertime of my life is long over, but summertime always comes around again. Summertime is fleeting, but in memory it lasts forever. Summertime is always for children and old people.
One more…Lana Del Rey’s evocative rendition of Summertime is as rich and languid as any hot summer day could be. It makes you grateful for summertime and all that goes with it:
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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