|
Faithful husband, soccer dad,
basset owner, and former cowboy
Return to TboggHomePage
FELLOW TRAITORS
*The Nether-Count*
100 Monkeys Typing
Ain't No Bad Dude
Alicublog
Americablog
American Leftist
Attytood (Will Bunch)
Bad Attitudes
Balloon Juice
Better Inhale Deeply
Bitch Ph.D
Bloggy
Bob Harris
Brilliant At Breakfast
BusyBusyBusy
Byzantium's Shores
Creek Running North
Crooked Timber
Crooks and Liars
Cursor
Daily Kos
Dependable Renegade
David Ehrenstein
Democratic Veteran
Dohiyi Mir
Down With Tyranny
Echidne of the Snakes
Edicts of Nancy
Elayne Riggs
Eschaton (Atrios)
Ezra Klein
Failure Is Impossible
Feministe
Feministing
Firedoglake
First Draft
Freewayblogger
The Garance
The Group News Blog
Guano Island
Hairy Fish Nuts
Hammer of the Blogs
Hullabaloo(Digby)
I Am TRex
If I Ran the Zoo
I'm Not One To Blog
Interesting Times
James Wolcott
Jesus' General
Jon Swift
Juan Cole
King of Zembla
Kung Fu Monkey
Lance Mannion
Lawyers Guns and Money
Lean Left
Liberal Oasis
Main & Central
Majikthise
Making Light (Nielsen Hayden)
Mark Kleiman
Martini Revolution
MaxSpeak
MF Blog
MyDD
Needlenose
The Next Hurrah
Nitpicker
No More Mr. Nice Blog
Norbizness
Norwegianity
Oliver Willis
One Good Move
Orcinus
Pacific Views
Pam's House Blend
Pandagon
Pharyngula
Political Animal(K.Drum)
The Poorman
Progressive Gold
Right Hand Thief
Rising Hegemon
Roger Ailes
Rude Pundit
Rumproast
Sadly, No
Seeing The Forest
Shakesville
Sisyphus Shrugged
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
Slacktivist
SteveAudio
Suburban Guerilla
TalkLeft
The American Street
The Left Coaster
The Road To Surfdom
The Sideshow
The Talking Dog
The Talent Show
Tom Tomorrow
Tom Watson
Whiskeyfire
UggaBugga
Wampum
Wonkette
World O'Crap
TOSS ME
A BONE
Amazon Wish List
SOURCES
MSNBC
CNN
The Washington Post
Media Matters
The New York Times
The Guardian
Yahoo News
Salon
The Raw Story
Common Dreams
Media Transparency
The Nation
Alternet
Joe Conason
Talking Points Memo
THE VAST WASTELAND
Captain Corndog & Friends
Cheerleaders Gone Spazzy
80% True
Corner of Mediocrity and Banality
Village Idiots Central
Darwin's Waiting Room
News for Mouthbreathers
Mailbox
Your e-mail may be reprinted sans name and e-mail address. Think about how stupid you want to appear.
Blogroll Me!
Site Feed
|
Thursday, June 05, 2003
Summer beckons
As of this week it has been exactly thirty years (!) since I graduated from high school. And with my daughter graduating from middle school tomorrow, I'm reminded again that, in the real world, summer (not the season, but Summer! and all that it means) begins the moment that last bell rings on the last day of school. For those of us who go through the daily pretense of being adults it's hard to remember the dizzying feeling that you used to get when faced with the prospect of close to three months of sleeping in and playing and doing nothing if that's what you really wanted to do. Having grown up a mere two blocks from the beach in San Diego, summer has always reminded me of salt air and hot sidewalks, walking barefoot on humid prickly grass, playing with my friends out on the front lawn until the street lights came on, and doing something or nothing all day long because they mean the same thing when you’re a kid.
We don’t have a change of seasons here in San Diego where it seems like every day is 72 degrees with overcast skies in the morning with sun in the afternoon. But we recognize summer when it shows up on our doorstep. It’s big and it’s friendly and you can wrap your arms around it, hug it to your chest and it seems so solid you can take a bite out of it if you want. It lasts forever and then it's gone. In colder climates adults may speak of the coming of spring and its renewal of life. But where I live it’s summer when we are renewed and the child that lies barely beneath the skin wants to stretch his arms and legs and go outside and play.
Former baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once wrote:
Much of what we love later in a sport is what it recalls to us about ourselves at our earliest. And those memories, now smoothed and bending away from us in the interior of ourselves, are not simply of childhood or of a childhood game. They are the memories of our best hopes. They are memories of a time when all that would be better was before us, as a hope, and the hope was fastened to a game. One hoped not so much to be the best who ever played as simply to stay in the game and ride it wherever it would go, culling its rhythms and realizing its promises. That is, I think, what it means to remember one’s best hopes, and to remember them in a game, and revive them whenever one sees the game played, long after playing is over.
Although Mr. Giamatti was writing about baseball, his words speak to me of summer and a child’s summertime belief that life was a big glorious never-ending game and we got to play in it no matter what our talents. And it’s those memories of summers past and endless games and freedom that we unpack that first warm evening when the smell of night-blooming jasmine comes through an open window and we hear the crickets that were there all along but we never took the time to listen to them.
So tomorrow afternoon when my daughter’s graduation ceremony is over, summer will begin, and I think we’re going to stay out until the streetlights come on…maybe later. And we may do something or we may do nothing at all, because they both mean the same thing when you’re a kid.
Deep in our heart of hearts we are all kids. All we really need to do is remember how to play like one.
|
|
