One Summer ...

One summer I worked at a job where we had to wash hundreds of Venetian blinds in a tall metal tank that stood in a loud room next to the air circulation fans. We dipped the blinds in soapy water in the tank, and then we moved them up and down. The dipping was supposed to remove the dust from the slats, but the dust had bonded with the paint, and it stayed. So the man said we had to wash the slats by hand, with a rag. This made the white paint come off. We put all the blinds back in the windows, although they were bent and peeling and sorry-looking.

One summer I went to a Nautilus fitness center at the Americana Hotel in Rochester, N.Y. I did various strenuous things on the machines, and then I crossed the street to McDonald's and ordered two Big Macs. My hand trembled so much from the exercise that I could barely push the straw through the little cross in the lid of my root beer.

One summer my son and I built a treehouse near the compost pile. We painted it green. We ate dinner up there a few times.

One summer, after my wife and I spent all day packing boxes, I had a dream in which I'd grown a split personality that snarled and lunged at me like a police dog. I woke up and lay perfectly still, too afraid to close my eyes or click on the light. After several minutes of motionless nostalgia for the days when I had been a sane person, I finally touched my wife and said, "Dear one?" She made a questioning noise from deep in her sleep. I said, "I'm sorry to wake you, but I'm having some kind of unusual panic attack." She said, "I'm so sorry, baby." I said, "It's really bad. I'm scared about everything. I'm even scared to turn on the light." She said, "I'll hold you. Everything is good. Go back to sleep now." She held me, and I turned a different way in the bed, and the fear dissolved, and I went back to sleep. I woke up feeling fine.

One summer I warmed up a bowl of hot fudge in a microwave and then dropped it onto the kitchen floor of a Howard Johnson's and burned myself.

One summer my friend and I dug in his back yard using a hose to blast holes deep in the dirt. We made a series of small ponds and bogs. My friend's mother was unhappy with us because the water bill was very high.

One summer my family and I ate dinner at a restaurant that had a machine that made saltwater taffy. The machine had two double-pronged forks that folded and stretched the taffy ball onto itself until there were unimaginable numbers of layers. When the taffy had been stretched and folded enough times, a man rolled it into a loaf and mounted it in a machine that cut it and wrapped the cut pieces with wax paper wrappers. The device that twisted the wrapper ends moved too fast for the eye to see. The taffy man looked at us without acknowledging us or smiling. He had a small mustache. He had no privacy -- he was like a zoo creature.

One summer we moved from Boston to New York state. I was driving the old brown car and my wife was driving the new red car down Route 5 and 20. There was a big hot blue sky and enormous trees. I rolled my window all the way down. Immediately the wind sucked a map of New York state off my dashboard. In my rearview mirror I saw the pale creased shape float on air for a moment, as if deciding what to do. Then it plastered itself to my wife's windshield, where she pulled it inside. She waved.

One summer I wrote "Truth wears sunglasses" in my notebook.

Nicholson Baker's novels include The Mezzanine, Vox and Checkpoint.