#61 - Dog Days and Corn Silk

Headlong in our youthful celebration of freedom on Old Broad Bay, we were under a lot of pressure in those hot sweaty days of August. There was just plain too much to do! The newspapers were mercilessly advertising back-to-school sales. It only brought me and my cousins to a fevered pitch in our daily exploits. Life was cruel back then.

It was too short, and that, every year, flavored our glorious but fleeting summer vacation with a hell-bent-nothing-to-lose mentality. The old, woody station wagon we all learned to drive in fairly flew across the fields as though it was the last summer on Earth, and the timothy and black-eyed Susans caught in his rusty fenders were clear testimony to the wild pace we were living at.

It wasn't easy being a kid with no time to lose, and the demands on our time were many, with all the picnic baskets and thermoses and bathing towels to lug down to the boat; it would have been much faster to simply leave those things behind and get going. The porch always needed sweeping too, and whole hours of our time we're squandered picking blueberries, if we expected pie.

There was no time even to sleep. I remember interminable nights spent in clammy U.S. Army sleeping bags, fighting the mosquitoes. Without a tent, sleep was close to impossible. Those nights were used up in endless speculation about things and noises out there in the dark . . . and in miserable indecision - whether to suffocate down inside that mildewy old bag or to breath the cool, night air and get eaten alive. Many were the mornings when we trudged, bleary-eyed and bitten, back to the house for pancake breakfasts, only stepping on the dewy spider webs on the long stretch across the lawn.

Tough times, they were, but oh how I yearn for them now! Somehow, perhaps miraculously, I always managed to find just enough quiet moments to steal away after the heat of the day to a private place in the late afternoon, just enough time to catch my breath and reflect on it all.

There was a grassy knoll out on the point with a giant oak tree to lean against. As the shadows got long and the lowering sun grew golden on the water, I dug down in my back pocket for that precious wad of corn silk and my corn cob pipe. Only a dog knew how to live out those long, summer days, it seemed, but here in this place I felt I was getting the hang of it. Curls of acrid smoke lifted up through the leaves, and I thought to myself about the meaning of growing up . . .  and what lay ahead.