James Etheridge

Today summer is over. Not officially, that doesn’t happen until September 22, but for all intents and purposes, the last day of summer is Labor Day. Some will say that the Saturday before is the start of autumn with the kickoff of the college football season. Either way, it is another trip around the sun and another summer behind.

As kids the summer seemed to last forever. The months between the last day of school and the first day of the next school year were spent waiting for the ice cream truck, exploring in the creek, playing in the sprinkler and vacations with our parents. That’s kind of all out the window now. School starts at the end of July and goes through until the end of May. That gives kids not quite a two-month break. That’s hardly enough time for a real summer vacation, let alone a summer job. I realize that there are about four breaks during the school year, but it’s not the same. As teenagers many of us had our first taste of the workforce with summer jobs. In our free time we could do anything we pleased within reason, sometimes without, such as swimming, skiing, dating, beach trips, lake trips, thrill rides, ball games or simply hanging out with friends on a lazy afternoon.

The heat of summer often heated up our lives as well with summer romances as well. While some summer flings faded as the season wound down, others became loving, lasting relationships. Others evolved into lifelong friendships. The most memorable summers in my life, for various reasons, were 1968, 1973, 1976, 1982 and most recently, 2010. All summers are great, but these stand out above all in my memory and yes, some of them involved a summer romance.

On July Fourth, 1968, at the age of thirteen I endured the worst sunburn I have ever experienced in my life. We were in Fort Pierce, Florida visiting my aunt, uncle and cousins. We arrived at the beach around eight in the morning and stayed the entire day. I got burned to a crisp. This was in the days before sunblock and skin cancer awareness. That evening all I could do was lay face down on the couch. My parents’ car did not have air conditioning and the ride home from Fort Pierce to Atlanta was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. A few days later I started to peel. I literally looked like an onion and did not want to go out in public lest any of my friends, girls in particular, see me. It taught me a lesson about precautions against sunburn. Of course I got sunburned at stages of my life afterwards, but never again that bad.

In the early Eighties, a new wave band called The Motels released a haunting, melancholy tune called Suddenly, Last Summer. The lyrics touch on the beginning and ending of a summer romance and the fact of knowing that the summer is ending. I used to listen to the song while sitting on my back deck each Labor Day. I would move my chair back and back until I was at the very corner of the deck and watch the sun go over and behind the trees. Suddenly that summer was last summer. It was gone. The heat would linger into late September, but summer was suddenly and abruptly past.

For most of us aging Boomers, the weeks between Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day seem to get shorter and shorter. Summers now are not the same as the carefree summers of our youth. We curse the heat, the humidity, the mosquitos, the rain or the lack thereof. We long for the cool, crisp mornings of late September and the afternoons of October. The promise of the coming fall will soon be fulfilled, but it is fleeting as well, bringing on the dead of winter and the hope of the distant spring. And hopefully, we will weather the coming seasons and remember this summer next summer. Until then, I’ll have the warmth of the sun within me at night.