Swinging into summer at last
It’s summer, all right. If you don’t grab the paper off the driveway by 8 a.m., it begins to bake. Seriously, if the pressroom added flour and a dusting of cinnamon, you could eat a newspaper for breakfast.
Yeah, it’s summer, and the little guy’s baseball infield is already burning up. Dried-out patches of it crunch under my shoes like broken glass. Over in the bleachers, the Chardonnay Moms hug themselves despite the 90-degree heat, complaining about it still being “a little chilly in the shade.”
I don’t get women. They’re always cold. That’s not the only reason I don’t get women, but it hints at their deeper mysteries. They are unsolvable. The female mind is like a glorious mansion, but with too many rooms they’ll never let men visit.
The dads, meanwhile, sit in the shade, simmering in their own juices, dreaming of cold beer and long naps. The male mind is a simple log cabin open to all.
Out on the field, our 13-yearolds are swatting baseballs and hitting puberty. Sometimes puberty actually occurs while they’re running between bases, sometimes in the middle of an at-bat. Puberty’s like the flu. For a while, you think everyone is getting it but you. Then, all of a sudden, your throat itches.
Watching them hit puberty is like watching butterflies turn back into caterpillars. If you’ve had teens before, you know what flawed yet wonderful insects they are about to become. They lose their freckles. They lose their puppy breath. Replacing that is attitude and eye rolls. It’s a beautiful time.
Speaking of beautiful times, the summer solstice is soon upon us, so if you’re thinking about gifts, just get me a big fat book, the kind of 900-pager that could break a knee if you drop it.
In fact, the other night at a dinner party, we were exchanging reading tips. Mary Fran said that summer is the only time she really has to read, what with teaching and parenting duties during the school year. I recommended “The Girl on the Train,” a murder mystery that’s so difficult to put down it’s almost unsettling. It owns you — the kind of book that gets in your head like an abusive boss. Or a new love. How many times does that happen?
Anyway, the best reading tips always come from smart friends. Val recommended “The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion.” Tom recommended the Old Testament. I recommended Major League Baseball’s rule book. The conversation deescalated from there.
Yet it was an excellent party, full of Chardonnay Moms and Trophy Dads. This young woman Jenn, whom I might know from work — or someplace — hosted it at her parents’ beautiful home in a leafy part of Pasadena. Who knows where her mom and dad were. Probably they’d fled, as I do whenever a bunch of thirsty guests threaten to show.
Some people shun Pasadena, mock it for a chronic lack of excitement, but I dismiss them as too dense to pick up on the city’s noirish undertones, the general lawlessness of the conversations, the latent sexual heat.
To me, the sultry streets of Pasadena tremble with excitement — till about 8 p.m., when everything pretty much shuts down and all you hear are the neighbors’ TVs. But till then, it can be an extremely fetching semi-city.
As I said, it was a very good dinner party. I lost my car keys in a big snowy plate of vanilla cake — or maybe it was a creamy torte — so whoever cleaned up later got a free Camaro.
It’s an older model, the color of dried blood, with sunflower seeds in the cushions. At night, you don’t even need to lock it. But it’s the perfect car for taking people to the airport, where you can careen off the other cars at the departure level and not worry a wit. It’s also excellent for hauling giant bags of manure home from the nursery.
Whoever “won” the Camaro might want to check the spare. If there is a spare. And good luck getting it smogged. At highway speed, it seems to emit a fishy combo of chimney soot and cheese.
So, from all this activity, you can see that summer has arrived — an insanely beautiful time. Full of free cars and caterpillars, it seems to have gotten off with a bang, not a whimper.
Not a big bang. More like the pop your knee makes when you turn the wrong way on a bankhanded compliment.
I recommend ice.