First Day of Summer

It brings to me the sweetest nostalgia of my childhood. When you live on LI, with crappy weather from late Fall until Spring, Summer is the best. Since 1979 I've lived in a place where summer is the least desirable -- a time of weeks on end of sweating just to pick up the morning paper, and humidity that comes from the tropics. Still, there's the occasional breeze, or respite from the Bay, and it's nicely endurable. Wifey has fled, to cooler Atlanta for a week. Yesterday there was a health scare with her best friend's daughter, which thankfully turned out to be no big deal, so she and her closer than a sister can happily resume their week of endless conversation -- "getting each other" as no one else can or really wants to. She so cherishes her time there, and I'm content to stay here, feeding and cleaning up after our spoiled dogs. But back to memory...D2 endured me last weekend, as I schlepped her to LI for the day -- truly a trip down memory lane, to a time when my own life was all that mattered to me -- the exquisite freedom of youth. My brother Paul and I had a long talk yesterday about parenting -- how some people, mothers, it seems, more than fathers, burden their children with their own insecurities and anxieties, turning children into messed up proto-adults. We agreed this was a supreme form of robbery -- they steal the best part of their kids' lives from them, the one time where their only concerns should be themselves -- learning who they are, and where they fit in in this huge world. That's why I recall my childhood and first years of college so beautifully. My parents never saddled me with their problems -- they let me be a child and then young man. Four days before I turned 21, everything changed for me -- my Dad died in my arms, and I went from a 20 year old thinking only about girls, friends, and my future career path to becoming man of the house. As Tony S said -- what are ya gonna do -- and so I played the hand I was dealt -- but if a young person is lucky enough to NOT lose a parent young, then a parent who dumps on them anyway is really awful. There was no dumping on me during the summers of my youth. There were trips to Jones Beach, or up to the gorgeous Planting Fields, where we talked, and learned human nature from each other -- said "I love you" and heard it for the first time, and felt the lighting, as Bob Seger sang, while waiting on the thunder. And it all seemed to happen in the summertime.