Summertime, Some Other Time

When I was a young man, and still in High School, I was regularly pressed into attending “Summer School” classes that were supposed to help me beef up my transcript. But I suspected that their true purpose was to keep me and my fellows out of our Moms’ hair for another month, or so. I therefore, only grudgingly took whatever classes seemed easy, and were represented in the schedule, as being dismissed by lunchtime.

Like most of my peers, I hated the very idea of wasting all of those great early summer mornings sitting in a classroom studying ANYTHING, let alone something requisite for College-prep. It seemed so unnatural to get up that early in the Summer (before 9:00 A.M. for crying out loud!), and to get dressed for school in the middle of June.

To be fair, it was the sixties, and we were allowed to wear shorts (not ‘cut-offs’) to Summer School, which wasn’t too bad, but there was still a dress code regarding our hair length, buttoned shirts tucked into the pants, and (worst of all) minimum skirt and shorts lengths for the girls. Ahhh, Summer School. I remember it clearly, if not dearly. I especially remember the Summer of my Sophomore Year.

We trudged onto the lonely campus, my fellow inmates and I, wondering why only those classrooms way out back ever plied their wares in the dog-days of Summer. Being near the athletic fields, our trek to the back of the campus required walking past all of those empty rooms in the front buildings, with their windows and doors splayed open to provide a free flow of morning air in, and to allow the liquid poetry of The Lovin’ Spoonful, Otis Redding, and The Beach Boys out. This was done, we were sure, in order that they might more fully mock our academic plight in their own transcendent escape from the boxy confines of the custodians’ radios, as floors were stripped naked and dressed in fresh wax against the day (months hence) when the rooms would see student pedestrian traffic again.

I remember the smells of heated pavement, salted air off of the back-bay at Newport Beach, and the aerosol interruption of sprinkler-mist from the Football Field. I remember the sounds of actual life in the surrounding neighborhoods.

There were the occasional sights of friends motoring toward the seashore southward, cars gorged with tanned and reddened teens, gleaming boards of fiberglass, like cutlasses of modern wave-riding buccaneers poking skyward from every portal along their heaving upper decks, as though anxious for the glory of impending battle with Nature’s elements, honed to a sharpness fit only for cutting their salt-surf prey. Chilled cans of bubbled sweetness, adorned in chests of miracle Styrofoam were strapped to the car roofs like rations for some long journey, provisions to slake the thirsts sure to be encountered on this youthful voyage of discovery.

I remember the smiling, fresh-faced revelations of young femininity, teak-tanned from former cruises, replete in pastel colored sundress splendor, sitting beside their young mariner-warriors, providing an astonishing contrast to the impending beach-head melee, an epic contradiction for the eye, majestic figure-heads of sweetness adorning the prows of these sea-bound clippers of surf assault.

The brigands’ own battle cry music collided midair with the emanations from those front classrooms, on occasion echoing in do-wop harmony, but mostly discordant, as ‘Surf’ and ‘Grease’ vied for my audio-attention.

Friends passing by our dungeon-keep, on their way to anticipated adolescent decadence, would glance upon our chain-gang entrance to the hallowed halls of public learnedness, and mark our entry, grist for another day’s milling of indoctrination in unimaginable, un-summer-like subjects.

Lesser lights among them smiled from the corners of their mealy mouths upon our plight, and whispered asides to their glory-bound fellows. Their muffled annotations yielding chortles and catcall-laughter aimed in our general direction from the rear seats of their enameled zephyrs, like broadsides fired from ships thought kindred to us, stinging and bruising us as only a cannonade of hurtful comrade words is able, until spent at our expense, they’d fall about us, steaming, sooty, graffiti smudges of their mockery, staining the stucco walls around.

Closer friends conversely, on seeing and grasping our hapless class-bound dilemma, stared upon us in dumbfounded horror, as though at some profoundly gruesome train versus pedestrian collision encountered unexpectedly along their joy-bound way. Being truer friends, they wished to help. Being merely mortal, they feared the wrath of our tyrant taskmasters within the walls. Being thoroughly human, they merely traveled on, their blank expressions and dull-eyed stares taking on the very hue of our own, sad but helpless; fellow spirits caught in parallel, albeit antithetical worlds. They journeyed on.

I remember the familiar, institutional smells of that one particular class-cell, although in June heat somehow warmer and more pungent than in semesters past; assaulting my olfactory senses, even as sardonic images of what I should have smelled instead, whirled past the windows outside, searing themselves into my optic nerves, a cruel melodrama between what was and what could have been, acted out before me as on some actor’s stage. All of my subsequent higher brain functions became hopelessly distracted from more mundane didactic endeavors, a luckless infraction of June’s outdoor distraction.

Young Swallows stretched their new, and as-yet unfamiliar wings in the blue of the sky-patch visible above the neighboring buildings. A dragonfly, and 2 accompanying Skipper-moths drifted lost into our little mausoleum, and lingered in the shaft of sunlight behind the teacher’s desk. They frolicking momentarily, comparing insect aerobatic skills with their own youthful zeal. Upon suddenly becoming aware of their indoor locale, they seemed to pause midair, and remembering themselves in one embarrassed hiccup of time, they dipped their wings to us as if in silent tribute to our lost souls, then made good their escape. Our spirits allied in that moment with theirs; fellow travelers in the pressing rush of life too short, adventures yet had, dreams untried, and life not lived. Seeing us perhaps prompted them to reflect upon their own fleeting mortality, caught as we were in the inky black arachnid web of classroom- squandered possibilities.

Dust swirled lazily in the sunbeam by my desk. The lonely call of an Ice Cream Truck beckoned from some blocks hence, borne our way on an errant breeze- the exhalation of suburbia, sweet with blended fragrances of grass freshly mower-eaten, and honeysuckle dew just drunk up by the risen sun.

The Helm’s Bakery wagon rounded the nearby corner, headed East with children in tow, modern Pied Piper in vintage Chevy Panel-truck. Yellow drake with gold-haired ducklings quack-ling nervously behind. Donuts in sticky glazed fists juxtaposed on triple-chromed Stingray handlebars, rounded the block toward their personal, jelly-filled Nirvana.

Summer the distraction. Summer somewhere….else. Summer unrealized. Summer yet unknown. Summer yet un-tasted. Summer beckoning from somewhere offstage. Summer at times screaming for my undiluted concentration like some siren-song crone beckoning from yonder jagged rocks…

But what’s that? Teacher speaks. Reality bites at my ideality, summarily lifting the gory head of my imagined wanderings from atop the now bloodied shoulders of my alternate reality with one fell snap of its gaping maw. Further education requires my immediate attention.

Teacher

She wants to know just what I think
‘bout lesson taught, I start to blink.
What did she say scant moment ago?
Can I address what I don’t know?

I panic for a moment there,
and try to bluff, but my blank stare
gives me away before I can
erect a case for why I am

sitting there gawking out the door,
caught in my reverie for sure,
I vainly feign some thought that’s huge,
but she’s seen through my subterfuge.

I stand stripped of my haughtiness,
and ruminating others’ bliss,
return myself to school’s rude tidings,
and feeling naked, skulk for hiding.

Now teacher turns to other business,
assignments, grades, and weekly quizzes.
Cold water, onto class unwary,
Grim her look, and really scary!

Comes her clincher, half our grade,
will be comprised of efforts made
in research, and study, and typing, and stuff
by midterm, a paper submitted in rough,

then completed and polished and read to the masses
of students around us, the last day of classes.
With no remedy granted, and no quarter offered,
If we want to pass, our full effort we’ll proffer.

Oh the humanity! Ahh, the unfairness,
how can she expect us to quickly embrace this?
The first day of class, is supposed to be easy,
But teacher has tricked us, it really is sleazy.

A paper, an essay, what subject pray, tell?
It’s not like our brains are a fathomless well.
I’m silent, I’m brooding, I’m cut to the quick,
Of all of the subjects from which she could pick,

She’s chosen the one I’m most likely to dread,
The muse has gone silent, full out of my head.
How can she expect me to fill 5 full pages,
With stuff on this subject, submitted in stages?

“Write something ‘bout Summer,” she says through her teeth,
“I’m sure that has meaning that’s hidden beneath,
Your teenage façades of rebellious self-loathing,
You must have some insights that could be worth knowing.”

“So give me your utmost, don’t think it a bummer
Please write me your views on the ‘Deep Things of Summer.’”
“Not I!” I am thinking, I have nothing to share
no analogy, simile, or metaphor’s there.

It’s hopeless, I’m lost, there no hope on this score,
I’m bollixed, forlorn, and confused to my core.
I lament to my brethren my parents restraining
my using this Summer to take Driver’s Training.

Its above me, I’m stupid. I can’t bear the thought,
can’t do the assignment, I’m really distraught.
My blood pressure’s rising, my nails I am biting.
Lord, WHY did I ever take CREATIVE WRITING?!!!

Ahh, the Summer of ’69!
Pastor John