Tag: memories

Summertime Magic

I still remember the satisfying feeling brought on by cleaning all the papers out of my desk and tossing them directly into the trash on the last day of school — no need to so much as glance at any of them. The day’s rising heat brought with it the promise of beach days, long, lazy afternoons punctuated by grape Popsicles, and running leaps through the backyard sprinkler. 

Summer meant visits from the neighborhood ice cream truck, rainbow-colored snow cones, and clusters of sweaty kids clutching damp dollar bills. My sister and I raced around the neighborhood on our bikes (no helmets! no shoes!), completely disregarded all advice regarding sunscreen, and stayed up well past our bedtime every night waiting for the sun to finally go down. Everything we did seemed to have an aura of magic to it.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that magic and how I might try to recapture some of it.

When I was growing up, my friends and I were fully present during our summer vacations, no matter what we were doing. We weren’t thinking about all the chores we were supposed to do or that school was starting soon. Whether we were playing kickball with the neighborhood kids, making Italian ice runs to the corner store, or just hanging out on the porch trying to keep cool, that time was ours. We weren’t going to let anyone or anything take it away from us.

It’s rare these days to have any amount of time that’s truly our own. We’re accessible 24/7 on our phones. Our attention is constantly being drawn in ten directions at once by television monitors, emails, the daily news cycle. We’re always worried about the state of our country, the possibility of war, corrupt, evil politicians, the bills we have to pay, the kind of world we’ll leave behind for our kids.

All of those things are pressing, but they’re not going away, at least not anytime soon.

Summer is fleeting. It’s time we took all took a step back and carved out some time to enjoy the smell of freshly cut grass, the way the air smells when a sudden rainstorm hits the hot pavement. We can count the fireflies as they hover and flash on summer nights, and wake up early to hear the songs of morning birds.

We can dig holes in the sand and eat ice cream cones, read novels, stare at the sky, turn the music up loud in the car. We can do whatever we want if we let ourselves, even if it’s just for an hour or a lunch break or between phone calls. It doesn’t even need to cost anything.

The magic is still out there. Go and find it.

ENP

Lost World

The other day, I was sitting at my kitchen table eating pistachios. The small pile of shells that formed as I ate them triggered a memory of my mother, something I hadn’t thought about in a long time: When I was two or three years old, before my younger sister was born, I used to go with my mother to buy pistachios at the department store candy counter. Unlike today, you couldn’t just walk into a grocery store and buy them. Pistachios were a luxury. You had to make a special trip to get them.

The woman who worked at the candy counter was an older lady. She wore her gray hair pulled back into a bun and sometimes had a Band-Aid stuck to the side of her nose. I never knew what the Band-Aid was for, but I always found it fascinating. A Band-Aid on your nose!

The woman would ask my mother if she wanted the red pistachios or the natural ones. They had both kinds on display, piled up into mounds behind the glass. My mother always chose the natural ones, just one pound because of their price. The lady would scoop the nuts into a white paper bag with red stripes on it. Then she would place the bag on a scale to weigh it, and would either add more nuts or remove a few until the amount was just right.

The candy counter also sold balloons. These were not filled with helium, just regular air. Because they couldn’t float on their own, the balloons were attached to long wooden sticks so that you could carry one around and it would look like it was floating. Sometimes when my mother bought pistachios she would offer to get me something, too. I never wanted candy. Always, I chose a balloon, preferably a red one.

When we got home, my mother would sit in the living room and eat her pistachios while she watched her favorite television shows. These were mostly soap operas, nothing I found that interesting. After making sure my balloon was stored in a safe place, I used to sit on the floor and play with my toys or look at a book while a small pile of pistachio shells formed on the coffee table.

At the time, my mother was the same age that my daughter is now.

My mother died of lung cancer in September 2020. She was a lifelong smoker. She never quit, even after she was diagnosed with cancer. Up until recently, I’ve mostly been angry with her about it. But sometimes an old memory comes back to me unexpectedly, and for a while the anger disappears.

ENP