Editorial

BOOK ‘EM, DICK-O

When I was akid, summer was a planet unto itself, stretching in all directions beyond the horizons, bounded by nothing but sunshine, green grass, stray dogs, swimming holes, marathon reading sessions ranging far and wide, games held under street-lights, and endless possibilities.

“Do youremember how long summers used to be?” I recently asked a friend as he contemplated summer vacation. He’s a teacher, so he knows more about summer than most of us.

He seemed perplexed by my question.

“You know,” I expanded. “It used to seem to go on forever.”

“Yeah?” he said, not certain where I was going with this.

“Oh?” was all I could think to say. “That’s all you’ ve got to say about it?”

“Well, it was different,” he ventured. “We were younger then.”

“We had a different perspective.”

“What do you want me to say?” he asked, getting a little testy, as though it were a pop quiz.

“All T want is for you to explain why summers were longer when we were kids than they are now.”

He scratched his chin, his idea of contemplation. “Weren’t winters longer, too?”

I had better luck with another friend who was on his third beer and had a very interesting theory: “When we were kids, summer (and, by implication, winter) seemed to go on forever because we were just kids and hadn’t lived very long yet, so any season constituted a very large percentage of our lives to that point. Now that we’re older and have more than 50 summers behind us, any one summer isavery small piece of our whole life.”

Idecided not to open another beer because I could see that my friend’s mind was getting ready to disgorge any number of theories on anything I came up with. But his answer did hold a kernel of insight. Summer, unbounded by schedules and duties like homework, and expanded by early sunrises and late sunsets, constituted its own unique state of mind.

My own mind had been swinging in the direction of summers past because after a particularly cold winter for Northern California, we hada succession of days in February that teased us with characteristics of summer. The temperatures rose to the mid-60s, there was no fog first thing in the morning so the sun could begin warming the landscape from the moment it

EDITORIAL @ 9

rose, and its presence was nudging the plant life into an early eruption. It was so pleasant that during the two hours when the slanted sun hit the picnic table out back, I took several inches worth of solicited and unsolicited manuscripts and read them under a sun that triggered an early seep of seratonin.

The combination of reading stories under a warming sun and the raised seratonin levels seemed to suspend me over a warm thermal vent that boiled to the surface memories long interred.

As though it were yesterday, I could vividly remember the summer of my tenth year—the year before I became the envy of the neighborhood kids by getting a part-time job at the local bakery, delivering baked goods off the running board of a blue Chevy panel truck.

That summer had only two gears: neutral and overdrive. It was ripe with hours of reading under the maple tree in the park just below our street: Turok, Son of Stone comic books, where we were willing to suspend what we’d been taught all year, ready to believe that human beings lived at the same time that dinosaurs did; Tom Swift, Jr., books filled with marvelous adventures that the adults around us were certain would never happen (they conveniently forgot Tom Swift, “Sr.,” titles from their youth, such as Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship, Tom Swiftand His Airline Express, and Tom Swift and His Wireless Message); Tarzan stories in any shape or form,

from comic books to novels; and the occasional classic, almost always something by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Jack London, or Robert Louis Stevenson—stories dripping with adventure and strange worlds.

The “overdrive” involved running—everywhere we went. This was before kids’ summers were scheduled to distraction and before mothers knew how to drive, and were much less willing to drop everything to drive kids to soccer practice. Kids took care of their own schedules, which meant they didn’t have one.

We ran in almost every game we played or made up. Weran to appointments we’d made with other kids to “mess around” for the afternoon. We ran like wild animals up and over and around Bear Mountain behind our house. We were either in hyperdrive or in suspended animation. There wasn’t much in between. We read or we ran. And if we had been more talented, we would have probably done both at the same time.

I wallow in those memories because they were so memory-friendly and because they involve this issue.

I’ve got to admit that I’ve been hoarding a little pile of longer-thanusual stories that involve adventure and exotic places and, of course, running. The session with the manuscripts at the picnic table under a mellowing sun convinced me that I should break into the cache and put them together in a special summer reading issue of MA&B: an issue oozing with running adventures on the edge.