Who among us hasn’t fallen victim to its siren call?
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- May 27, 2018
- 1253
Well folks, it’s Memorial Day weekend, and you know what that means.
Yep, it’s time to abandon nearly every survival instinct encoded in our DNA and tempt the fates by driving insanely long distances, battling hostile crowds, playing with fire, imbibing pleasant poisons and worst of all walking willfully into bodies of water that would just as soon swallow you whole as spit you out.
Ah, summer. Who among us hasn’t fallen victim to its siren call?
Those 100 days and nights that lie before us once more, stretched out like a blanket of stars, betoken life lived to its fullest and love enjoyed with no consequences. Nothing, it seems, is impossible.
Trust me on this, faithful readers. Enter into that Faustian bargain with eyes wide open and fingers crossed because bitter regret often follows on the heels of folly.
Am I suggesting that the only way to survive summer is to avoid its lustrous temptations and libidinous pratfalls? Certainly not.
Part of being human — the best part, some would argue — is to err gleefully, to zig when the crowd is zagging, to follow where the heart leads, to leap off the diving board into seeming bliss, only to discover that the surface of the water is harder than concrete and a lot less forgiving of seasonal hubris.
All I’m saying is give common sense a chance.
When I was 17 years old, my father packed the family into the Country Squire and drove hundreds of miles to a place called Cherokee Village, located in the Arkansas Ozarks.
Somehow, some way, he’d been lured into buying the dream of one day owning a timeshare condominium in a resort community squatting firmly in middle America, equidistant from the Atlantic and the Pacific. All he had to do was attend of series of seminars, listen to the sales pitch, pretend he was interested in uprooting the five of us and presto chango: We’d get a free week’s stay in the Ozarks in Arkansas.
The summer before, he’d steered the Squire east until we ran out of land and found ourselves in Virginia Beach, an ocean at our feet, an infinite and splendid horizon of sand and surf and sky in full view from our fourth-floor balcony.
In 1972, well, let’s just say we learned to deal with disappointment. Then again, you have to figure fate into the equation and that, spiced with summer’s pungent fragrance of possibility, mattered.
My sister, a precocious year younger, began hanging out with a biker with greasy hair and questionable intentions. My brother, not yet 15, was content enough with his books and his imagination and rarely left our quarters, having earned an Olympic medal in the sunburn competition the summer before. He still bore the scars, psychic and otherwise.
Mom and Dad dutifully rose early and trekked to the community center where they listened and learned a lesson that they’d already memorized during the Great Depression: There’s no free lunch.
That left me pretty much free to do as I chose, and once I got used to the idea that Cherokee Village was going to be home for the week, I fell into a leisurely routine that consisted of playing pinball, shooting pool, feeding quarters into the jukebox and the batting-cage machine, and spending endless hours on the beach.
Well, using the word “beach” might be a trifle misleading. It was, however, a sandy — if somewhat muddy — expanse of land that bordered a pretty — if somewhat muddy — body of water.
And then everything changed. It was like when Dorothy’s house crash-landed in Oz. The landscape suddenly shifted from sepia to Technicolor.
I saw her swimming alone in the shadows of the diving dock. She was wearing a lime-green bikini. Her slender shoulders were tanned and glistened in the sun. She wore an approachable look.
Nothing had adequately prepared me for what happened over the course of that week in Cherokee Village, but it was summer, and there I was, and there she was, and I wasn’t the first 17-year-old guy to fall in love with a pretty girl whose shy smile still lingers.
Well, using the word “love” might be a trifle misleading.
It was the summer of 1972. The Rolling Stones were on tour, promoting “Exile on Main Street.” The Watergate break-in had taken place but not taken hold. Registering for the draft was still compulsory. And that tanned girl with the shy smile and a fondness for the Tolkien Trilogy led me to a place where we existed happily, just the two of us, if only for a few stolen days and nights.
Summer’s like that. Enjoy it while you can but beware. Those placid waters can turn treacherous, and you won’t see it coming.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or at 6211Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page.