One Summer ...

One summer my grandmother took us to visit a blind woman who lived by the sea. The woman told us that when she swam, she would listen for her dog, who barked whenever she drifted too far from shore. Once she went out to do errands and didn't come home till very late. Her dog had had a bathroom emergency under a knicknack shelf, away from where she would step, which she thought was very considerate.

One summer I worked at a place where they stored old copying machines. I learned to drive a forklift, and I drove it around the old copying machines, beeping the horn, which made a plummy "meep meep." The second floor was filled with metal desks, and when it was break time, I would go up there to read spy novels. One of the people I worked with wandered around these desks drinking clear fluid from a bottle. That man sure drinks a lot of water, I thought. He opened and closed the drawers of the desks, checking to see if something of value had been left behind. I would listen to the sound of drawers opening and closing, far away and nearer by, and fall asleep.

One summer I went to Italy with my girlfriend and her family. My girlfriend's uncle brought a set of dissolvable capsules containing foam circus animals. Every night at cocktail hour we dropped one capsule into a glass of water. As each foam leg emerged, we would say, "There's another leg!"

One summer two of my friends and I found a loose door. We hauled it up to the top of the garage roof and positioned it there with some struts so that we could sit on the door and look out at the world. There wasn't much to do once we were up there except eat crackers, and the asphalt roof shingles were soft and easily torn, like pan pizza, we discovered. They overlapped unnecessarily, wastefully, so we tore off quite a number of them and flung them down. They glided like Frisbees. My parents were unhappy because they had to have the garage reroofed.

One summer I worked as a waiter in a fancy restaurant that had been owned by a reputed mobster. The mobster sold the restaurant to the head chef for a lot of money. But many of the people who'd gone to the restaurant had been friends and associates of the reputed mobster -- when he stopped going, they stopped going. So business dropped, and I stood wearing a ruffle-fronted shirt with a black bow tie, looking out at the empty tables.

One summer I converted all my old word-processing files, written on a Kaypro computer, to DOS. And that was fun.

One summer a guy down the street got mad at the fact that people were allowing their dogs to poop every day in front of his yard. He took some white plastic forks and put them in the dog poops. They looked like little sailboats.

One summer we had four fans set up in the upstairs bedrooms. One fan started smoking, and our alert dog barked to let us know. Then we had three fans.

One summer I read the Edmund Scientific catalogue a lot of times and fantasized about owning a walkie-talkie and communicating with my friends with it. But a set cost $100.

One summer I was on the verge of making a bologna sandwich. I had the tomato in my hand, and I'd opened the door of the refrigerator, and I was looking down at the jar of mayonnaise on the bottom shelf, and then I thought, No, no bologna right now. And I closed the refrigerator door. I was able to resist that bologna and put it out of my mind.

One summer I read an old copy of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater with great fascination.

One summer my father put up a Tarzan swing in our back yard. My friend and I used an old refrigerator crate as the leaping-off point, with two smaller boxes on top of that for extra height. We swung so high that we could grab a branch in a spruce tree and hold onto it. Then one time the branch broke, and my friend fell. He lay on his back going, "Orf, orf." I was worried and got my mother. She said he'd had the wind knocked out of him, but that he would be fine. And he was.