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This cartoon makes me nostalgic for the kind of summer I never really had. I had great times as a kid, but they were urban times (well, as urban as Tampa, Florida got in the 60’s… you may imagine that we weren’t exactly Manhattan South). I didn’t have a tire swing or a lake or a sunny field to ride my bike to. I did have a completely deserted school playground, a series of alleys that wound through some beautiful neighborhoods, a 5-mile stretch of sidewalk that ran beside a bay, although one had to jaywalk (it was jay-running, really, while pushing the bicycle) across a heart-pounding four lanes of fast traffic to reach it. I had movie theatres six miles away. I had a peculiar little stone tower on a nearby street corner — I think it used to be a planter, or something — just big enough to crawl up into and sit and read a book.
And I went to summer camp for several years. Day camp, not sleepaway camp. One of my parents would pack my lunch and my bathing suit in a paper bag and drive me every morning to the pick-up point, where dozens of kids would pile onto buses and off we’d go to the camp — a human-made lake, arts and crafts buildings, stables, a cafeteria, a fire pit, all surrounded by hundreds of acres of Florida scrubland. That meant southern live oaks shoulder-to-shoulder with royal palms, spanish moss, lots of dirt, sawgrass, blue jays and mockingbirds, buzzards, mosquitos, snakes, and the possibility of alligators.
Did I like it? Sometimes. I liked finally getting brave enough to run off the high dock over the lake, grab the rope attached to one of the oak trees, swiiiiing out and drop into deep water. I liked sitting around a campfire singing the “Once there were three fishermen” song because we all got shriek DAMN!! at the top of our lungs, which pleased our eight-year-old conventional selves mightily and never got old. The horses terrified me, and so did most of the other kids. But I always liked lunch.
I still miss the live oaks dripping with spanish moss under the biggest hot blue sky I’ve ever known, but Florida was never my land. It wasn’t until I got to New Hampshire that I discovered the real pleasure possible in wandering around outside with no particular destination. But in the summer, I always went home.
I live a busy life. I have a mind always full of ideas and internal conversation and lists of things to do, a noisy mind. But you know, one summer day before I die, I hope someone drags me out of the house still shrieking about all the things I have to do, and takes me to a tire swing and a lake and a grassy field and maybe for a hamburger and an ice cream cone. And there will be no talk of obligations. We will only talk about bunnies.