His Dogness

This column first appeared in the June 2014 issue of Forsyth Family magazine.

At the end of the work day some years ago, a friend and I stepped out of the office on an early day in spring into the remains of what had clearly been a marvelous day.

Every year at this time, he said, he got depressed. How so? Working such long hours, he said, he would come out at the end of one spring day after another feeling as if he had missed the heart of the day.

The beginning of each spring made him think about how, yet again, he was going to miss much of spring.

Although you can still savor spring when you work, I could see what he meant. I feel something of that same sense of loss at the beginning of summer. When you’re a kid, summer brings the sense of freedom that comes with the end of school – the kids’ version of work. For the most part, you can do whatever you want. When you’re an adult, summer may bring a vacation. Mostly, though, you keep going to work.

I imagine that, if I had lots of money, I would keep working – I would just find a way to take off two months during the summer.

Some of my fondest memories of summer date from the days when we lived in a small town in West Virginia. A bank sat on a corner near my house, and, after supper, any kid who wanted would just show up there to play hide-and-go-seek. The game would go on until it was too dark to be fun. I liked that any kid who wanted to play did and that you could show up and leave whenever you wanted. Days offered plenty of fun possibilities, too. There was a vacant lot where kids gathered to play wiffle ball. Kids would come over to our house to place shuffleboard on the court that my dad had painted on our driveway. And our neighbors Artie and Andy Henderson had a badminton set.

Their mother would bake chocolate chip cookies and leave a plate of them on the counter. They could take one whenever they wanted. When we walked through their kitchen, they might pick up a cookie. They might not. That amazed me. As the member of a family with five kids where any cookies that came into the house disappeared in an instant, it was all I could do to limit myself to grabbing two cookies from the plate.

It wasn’t always my idea to be outside during the day. I liked to read and, left to my own devices, might read for hours on end in my room. I smile at the memory of my mother – having had quite enough of a son holed up in his room on a beautiful summer day – coming in, taking my book, pushing me out the front door and telling me that she didn’t want to see me again until it was time for supper. If no group activity materialized, I might ride my bike or search the neighborhood for empty glass soda bottles that I could turn in for the deposit.

There was one summer when I really, really, really wanted a pair of flippers for swimming. That was the sort of luxury that, in our family, you didn’t just go out and get. You put it on your birthday list. I hated that my birthday was Sept. 3, which, although it would mean that the flippers would be on sale, would be far too late in the season to do much good. When I told that story to Sparkle Girl and Doobins, they were quite sympathetic and offered to get me flippers for my birthday.

I appreciated the thought, I said, but I no longer had any need for flippers. Garnet thinks that I should get a pair anyway and wear them around the house for the amusement of the family.