The Weekly Essay

Summer’s more than half over. That’s what I discovered when, for no reason I can explain, I suddenly stopped and asked myself, When exactly is midsummer? And myself replied, Why are you asking me? You’ve been asking yourself this question every summer, usually around this time, since you were eight, but now you’ve got the internet and you can just look up the answer. Although when you were a kid you could have asked an adult. Sure, some of them might not have known, and some would have thought it was funny to give you an answer like “The thirty-eighth of Cunegonde.” And don’t you feel stupid for not finding out you could ask questions like this at the reference desk in the library until your senior year of college so you spent a lot of time trying to find information on your own?

This is why I don’t talk to myself as much as I used to.

Even though I did wonder when exactly midsummer was when I was a kid most of the time I was too immersed in the joy of summer to stick with the question long enough to ever stop to ask anyone. Besides I didn’t want to waste time worrying about when summer would slip into its downhill slide. That time would come soon enough. I remember the summer morning when I was nine or ten and I woke up and heard neighbors shooting off fireworks. Fireworks were supposed to be for the fourth of July, I thought, so why were they having a breakfast snap, crackle, and pop that had nothing to do with cereal in their driveway? Then I went downstairs and saw the newspaper on the kitchen table and realized it was the third of July—the entire month of June was gone and I hadn’t even noticed. Also that was the previous day’s newspaper, although I’d walk around most of that day still thinking it was the third.

Also when I was a kid seasons seemed very arbitrary. Then I grew up and learned more about how the world worked and came to understand that seasons are completely arbitrary. When I was a kid summer started when school ended, and most of the time that was sometime in late May, but, according to the meteorological calendar, summer this year started June 1^st, with midsummer falling on June 24^th. Of course when I was a kid autumn didn’t start when school started, which was usually in late August. Summer vacation might be over but as long as the weather was warm and humid we were still in summer. Depending on the weather I wouldn’t think of it as autumn until sometime in early winter.

We’ve had a very mild, at times almost cold, summer this year, with it only just now starting to get really hot. I wear jeans and a hoodie in the house because I’m cold-blooded and we keep the air conditioning pretty well cranked up most of the time, but when I step out into the sunshine and still keep the hoodie on because it’s a bit cool that, to me, is just not summer. In fact it’s been so cool for most of June that one morning, when it should have been sweltering but was actually chilly, I yelled up at the sky, “You could turn down the air conditioning a little!” I knew it wouldn’t change anything, of course, and I even wondered why I was doing it, but I know better than to ask myself questions like that.

A deer wandered into our backyard. I’ve seen them in the front yard. One was even standing in the middle of the driveway one day when I came home. Before I could decide what to do–my options were waiting, honking the horn, or getting out and yelling at it, which I didn’t want to do because it had large antlers and those are scary when they’re on a deer and not mounted on a hunting lodge wall–it moved into the neighbor’s yard to feast on their tulips.

The deer in the backyard was an entirely different thing because our backyard is fenced and, with a few exceptions, like squirrels and chipmunks which can go through or over the fence, or the time I opened the backdoor and found a couple of raccoons on our patio which then slipped away over the fence into the night, or, more likely, into the neighbor’s garbage, the fence keeps out wildlife. I’ve seen deer in the wooded area behind the fence, and that seems the best place for them.

The weirdest thing about the deer in the backyard was how nonchalant it was. It didn’t have antlers–my wife reminded me it’s the wrong time of year for that, and it was probably young too. It must have jumped over the fence but by the time it came into my purview it was just casually strolling along. It stopped to munch on some dandelions then went over to the big tree that stood in the middle of the yard. To me there was still something really strange about it, about wildlife coming that close to the house. I know there are also possums, coyotes, and foxes in the neighborhood. There’s one house a few blocks away that has a really big yard, and in a corner by the road where there’s a culvert that’s overgrown with weeds we saw a family of foxes one day. The people who lived there put up a sign near the culvert that said “Slow–children at play” with a picture of a fox. A few blocks away in another direction there also used to be several acres of farmland that had been left to grow wild and it was a home for a lot of animals. Then it was all turned into a shopping center and the animals now move among our homes–the ones that survived, anyway.

There are still wild places, but suburban sprawl keeps on sprawling, pushing those places away, but the deer wandering across the backyard was a sign of nature pushing back.

Sometimes an idea or memory gets stuck in my head and, because there’s so much empty space, pings off every corner nonstop, and the only way I can get it out is to talk about it. Recently it’s been an expression I heard adults use when I was a kid: “like it’s goin’ out of style”. This was a simile used to say someone was doing something really energetically, which, if you’d asked me as a kid what it meant, that’s exactly how I would have defined it because I was a weird kid with much too formal diction. Anyway I’d hear an adult say something like, “Roger was eatin’ those crackers like it was goin’ out of style.” If that sounds bizarre, well, welcome to my world–I understood what they meant but there was still something really weird about the saying. Why would crackers, or eating them, go out of style? And if it was going out of style why would Roger want to eat a bunch of them? Was he eating up all the crackers before they got pulled from the shelves to make room for newer, more stylish crackers? It wasn’t just eating either. Raking leaves, washing the car, playing basketball–if someone was doing something really vigorously they were doing it “like it was goin’ out of style”.

At least “like it was goin’ out of style” was an expression I understood. An expression that completely baffled me was “going out of town”. As school wound down each year my friends would tell me their family was “going out of town”. What did that mean? We lived in the suburbs which, as far as I was concerned, was already out of town, since I thought of “town” as pavement and skyscrapers–what was, technically, downtown. My family went “on vacation”, which I understood because, even if we left town, we went to another town.

To get back to “like it was goin’ out of style” it occurred to me that I don’t hear that expression anymore, and haven’t heard it in a really long time. Like leisure suits and the nightmare-inducing live action shows of Sid and Marty Krofft it seems like it ended with the ’70’s. It should have gotten a final burst of use before disappearing but instead it seems to have faded away.

Unlike some of the relics of that era I think it’s an expression that needs a comeback so I’m going to start using it again. Every chance I get I’ll be using it really energetically, really vigorously. You know how I’ll be using it.

The student have graduated and left for the summer, marking the end of another year. Most college and university graduations happen sooner than high school so the ceremonies always take me by surprise. Growing up I thought of the end of school coinciding with the beginning of summer, which always meant mid to late May, although I had cousins in New England who weren’t released until June. I thought it was because the snow would shut down their schools so regularly, but that wasn’t the case. New Englanders, after all, are used to dealing with snow. In my cousins’ case it was just that their fall classes didn’t start until after Labor Day, whereas here they started in August, maybe because most schools had more reliable air conditioning than some homes.

Then there was the year I was in seventh grade and we had so much snow it shut down the whole city for weeks—Nashville, of course, not being used to dealing with snow. The school I went to for seventh and eighth grade was close enough that I could walk to it, and frequently walked home, but the snow meant the kids who relied on busing couldn’t make it in, so they just shut down everything.

The freeze lasted so long that the school board, which normally just tacked extra days onto the school year to make up for whatever we’d missed, decided that instead we should make up the loss by spending an extra half hour at school each day for about three weeks at the end of the spring semester. So we sat around doing nothing, but at least it meant our summer break wouldn’t be postponed.

College graduations, of course, are different, which may be why they come sooner. For most students they don’t just mean the end of school; they’re the beginning of adulthood. It’s a very different transition from all the ones that came before.

Congratulations, classes of 2023, wherever you may be graduating from, and good luck.

There’s now a soccer league, or, as the rest of the world calls it, football, in Japan for players who are over eighty. This is such a brilliant idea, although I think it’s diminished slightly by the fact that most of the octogenarian players are former professionals who’ve been out of the game for a few decades. It’s great that they’re still around and still able to get out on the pitch but I feel like players who’ve had glory days should, especially by the time they’ve passed threescore and twenty, step aside and let non-pros have a chance at making a goal or two. Maybe there are some players who’ve reached that age who were never that great at soccer in their youth but feel they have a better chance at competing against peers who haven’t had a couple of hip replacements. Maybe there are players who didn’t really have an interest in soccer when they were young but got pushed out onto the field by their parents and played miserably, without even really knowing what they were doing, would like another chance at the game late in life, having developed an appreciation for it in the intervening decades.

Yes, I am talking about myself, even though I’ve still got a few intervening decades before I reach my eighties. I didn’t really want to play soccer, but my parents told me to at least try it. So in the fall of third grade, after I went home from school each day, I’d go to another school for an hour or so of soccer practice. Then on Saturday mornings, instead of sleeping late and watching cartoons, I’d get up early and go run around a field for a couple of hours, which wasn’t that much fun in shorts, and in my case it was mostly just standing around because I didn’t have much idea what was going on. I have a vague idea that our team wasn’t very good and that we lost most of our games, but because I didn’t really know what was going on I was just waiting for the final whistle when we’d shake hands with the opposing team and then we’d all get hot chocolate.

By the third year I actually got a little better, but it was also my last year, and I was still easily distracted. The games started later so I was more alert on the field but we’d also moved to a different field that was next to a wooded area that looked swampy. Whenever there was any downtime—when we weren’t practicing kicking goals or doing laps around the field—I’d look longingly at the swamp and think I’d much rather be exploring it. But at least some of the time I was actually engaged in the game, even if I still hadn’t entirely figured out what was going on.

One Saturday morning, before a game was about to start, I was standing off to the side. A few guys on my team were kicking a ball around. I tried to get involved but they were top players and, while I don’t think they told me to go away, they weren’t interested in me joining them either. So I shrugged and walked away.

At that point a really old man—I think he was someone’s grandfather, or maybe great grandfather, who was an occasional presence at games—walked over to me and just started yelling at me. He told me I needed to pay attention, be aggressive, get out there and work or I’d never be any good as a player. He told me I was useless, that what I was doing was terrible, that it was important to focus, give it my all, and work for the team.

Even in sixth grade this kind of dressing down, especially by an adult, should have sent me off sobbing to hide in the backseat of my parents’ car, but it was so weird that this complete stranger focused on me I was certain he had me confused with somebody else. I knew I wasn’t much of a player but I also knew I really didn’t care enough for this warped version of a pep talk from a guy who, judging by the thickness of his glasses and the cloudiness of his eyes, could have easily been talking to one of the goalposts, to affect me.

It also helped that someone from my team, a tall, redhaired kid named Chuck who, like me, was a low-ranking player but still better than I was, came over and said, “Hey, Chris, come kick the ball around with us!” He was with a group that wasn’t that good but was just killing time before the game started, but that didn’t matter. Just like that I was released from the baleful rantings of a complete stranger and welcomed into a group that I’d never really felt I was part of.

Those two moments—one bizarre and, in retrospect, really awful, and one really great and uplifting—are my most vivid memories of childhood soccer.

I wouldn’t mind reliving that second moment. As for the first, I think that old guy needed a team of his own. Whatever the source of his bitterness was he didn’t need to be directing it at a random twelve-year old on a chilly spring morning. Soccer is, to most of the world, the beautiful game, because it’s open to everyone.