Summertime blues
“Summer is about longing for summer.” — Adam Gopnik
Americans can be said to have invented summer, or at least the advertising myth of summer as a time of thought-free frolic. For most of us—our friends spending a month outside Juneau, where today the high is projected at 64 degrees, can be excused—summer means scorching heat and sticky mornings.
Europeans get more summer leisure, with their extended vacations and disregard for commercial pursuits. We sweat through the season, daydreaming of beach reads and boat drinks, only to find ourselves lucky to steal a day by the water.
We have been sold the idea that summer is supposed to be fun—a filthy lie. Summer is cruel, a time of senseless shootings and crop burnings. Summer is mean, a relentless bully in a Hawaiian shirt with a machete and a smile of gold and pulp.
Friends and family from elsewhere in the country are checking in on us, alarmed by the circulating maps that show us occupied by fiery hell. (“It’s just the usual summer, Mom.”)
They say it is not the heat but the humidity that makes it so uncomfortable, but it is something else. I can take the heat, I can breathe through a wet dishrag, but I am annoyed by the pureness of summer—the way the air feels sterilized and objects pop out at you in crisp delineation as though you’re looking at the world through a hawk’s eye; the way the sun becomes a raging chemical sore in the sky, an angry white wound in the universe. Summer burns off the comfortable delusions in which we wrap ourselves— it lets us see things too clearly.
They say the heat can make you crazy, but what it really does is melt away civility. Craziness is always there, at the nut, but it takes the insistent heat and glare of summer to strip the containing layers.
Manners are the first to go. Our higher faculties hibernate—they’ve the sense to shut down—and leave us muttering and thwarted, struggling with a bottle opener, thrashing in our beds trying to locate a patch of cool cotton. Summer makes us stupid and petty, and sometimes the only thing that we can do is stay out of one another’s way.
If we feel ambitious maybe we can mix up a batch of mojitos or a Pimm’s Cup. Summer kills appetites and murders creativity. Columnists pull out lists and rerun old pieces. It is the time of slim paperbacks with shiny covers, when the moviehouses thrum with the loud and dull and long. (Though “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” might offer some respite, at least in their vibrant visuals.)
People who like pools might like summer. And kids in school certainly like summer. I didn’t mind summer when all I had to worry about was whether Roberto Clemente would win the batting title or if Ronnie Pelitier would strike me out three times and pitch another no-hitter against us in the championship game on Friday evening.
I guess I still looked forward to summer when I got to college—even if I was going to summer school and working it wasn’t so bad. Those were the days when the promise of a Schlitz tall boy and a ride to the lake with a couple of girls from Louisiana Tech was enough to keep us hustling for that minimum wage.
Summer taught me I wasn’t willing to work outdoors. Even though you could make better money building houses than clerking in a sporting goods store, I didn’t last as a roofer. And when my friend Billy got a summer job at the glass plant making $12 a hour (a fortune for unskilled
labor back then) I was interested until I found out he came home blackened with soot with singed eyebrows and that sometimes he would lose eight or 10 pounds during his shift.
Once I figured out I couldn’t throw well enough or run fast enough to be the infielder I’d always planned on being, I knew I was going to have to find a profession that would allow me to sit in an air-conditioned office during June, July and August.
My problem is not with summer per se and certainly not with the Beach Boy Endless Summer of myth, but with the brutal grinding summers of the South. Arkansas summer is a beast, though perhaps not quite as bad as North Louisiana piney summer or south Georgia red clay summer or Dallas hot-windacross-a-featureless-plain summer.
I do think Arkansas summer is worse than Phoenix 108-degree summer (though probably not worse than Phoenix 20-days-ina-row-over-110-degrees summer), though that may be a matter of taste. Normal Phoenix summer is no picnic, and while there is something to the “dry heat” theory—you feel more like you’re being microwaved or dried like a strip of jerky there, whereas we enjoy a kind of pressure-cooker effect—it is still a merciless season, compounded by the fact that green spaces are relatively rare in the Valley of the Sun.
The awful thing about a Phoenix summer is you can feel it through the leather soles of your shoes, radiating up from the sidewalk like some terrible industrial miscalculation.
We mightn’t have the worst summer, but it is worse here than most places. It is not so bad in most of California.
In the summer, we check the weather every morning to see where we rank in the standing of misery. We can take a perverse pride in being warmer than Las Vegas. Fayetteville is always a few degrees cooler than Little Rock.
New York City is always miserable in the summertime, but we go there anyway. At least in the movies they make it look picturesque. In his (highly problematic) “Manhattan,” shot mainly in the summer of 1978, Woody Allen draped Mariel Hemingway in cashmere sweaters, and Gordon Willis’ gray palette seems a few degrees more inviting than Technicolor. (But Spike Lee made Brooklyn look like sweltering brownstone hell in 1989’s “Do The Right Thing.”)
Meanwhile the electric meter spins like a dervish. Grass fries. Squirrels bite each other and scramble through trees. Sprinklers hiss and we hear—but hardly ever see—the melodic ice cream truck.
I don’t hate summer, I don’t, I don’t. But it is awfully hot. We take our dogs for walks, but Paris mostly rides in her wagon. She’ll get out and pad alongside us for the home stretch. Or not.
Maybe the best thing about summer is it provides us with excuses. Summer is not the time to begin a project or rededicate one’s life. Summer is a time to hide out, to wear dark glasses and seek shade. One works slower in the summer, if at all.
It is not the time to be hard on yourself; it is OK to let the grass grow up to tickle your ankles. It is OK to slump—a steaming heap—in front of a fan in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.
There’s no need for industriousness or diligence in the summertime. We needn’t fret about finding a proper ending for a column—the readers understand. It’s summer for them too.