Summertime, you shyster

By Felix Carroll

Summertime, you mesmerized us by your patter. You appeared in June from under an apple tree and glad-handed us like a barker in an old-time medicine show. You made promises you couldn’t keep. You’re nothing but a season of deceitful amenities with a short shelf life. Sunshine, you say. Freedom, you say. Bare feet, you say. We can have it all!

We were weak. We stepped right up for your miracle cure. We swallowed it down with a lemonade chaser and waited for you to take effect.

Fools, we are. Fools, I tell you.

“Yes,” we said, airing out our arms and legs on a cool evening under an ice-cream-scoop-of-a-moon, “I do believe it’s working. I do believe I feel better. I do believe this here ‘Summertime’ clears my head, loosens me up, and makes me easier to be around. I feel as though I could jump into a lake and then towel off and barbecue a hotdog.”

“You need to try this,” we proselytized to friends and family who remained muddled in a mid-winter mindset with their hands reflexively turning the thermostat clockwise. “No, I’m serious. Try it! It’s called ‘Summertime.’ It’ll blow your friggin' mind!”

Colors! Jeez, look at those colors! Green never looked so — what’s the word? — GREEN! And time — it warps! The days stay long. They don’t tuck their elbows in like they did in March or February or November. The days are full, chest puffed out.

We pushed, we pushed, we pushed as pushers push till we saw friends and family hooked and out back, skull dancing to Bob Marley.

Summertime, you caused us to do things we wouldn’t normally do. Like publicly display our twig-like pale limbs. Like set 20 tomato plants in the soil and wish we had planted 20 more. Like desert a perfectly weather tight house to camp in a tent.

Now here we are: Labor Day. Suntanned junkies wanting more, demanding you bear the weight of our impossible dreams. And where are you? Hello? Where are you?

“He was just here,” we tell the children as we strap brand new shoes to their feet and wrestle book bags to their backs. “I don’t know where he went. He was here, and now he’s not here, and I’m just as confused as you. Now go to school and I’ll look into it.”

We shoo them out the door. As we try to regain our wits, we hear a banging. We rush to the back door only to discover 400 yellow squash demanding entry into our kitchen.

“Where did all you guys come from?” we say. They don’t talk. They just shout. We have a hazy memory of promiscuous behavior back when Summertime first took effect. “Yes, I remember the tomato plants, but —.”

Finally, “I remember now. I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for work. It was a fine, soft morning, and I looked out the window and thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll go ahead and just plant some yellow squash, too. You know, keep the tomatoes company.’ Couldn’t hurt.”

We remember now how we went out in our pajamas and plugged squash seed after squash seed into our soil. We were high on Summertime. We were going to dig a root cellar and eat squash all winter. But the moment we put spade to earth we uncovered earthworms. And Summertime, you make us do weird things, so we decided to perpetuate the myth to our shoeless children of how when we cut earthworms in half we get two live earthworms.

“See?” we say to them, our eyes bugged out. “Two of them wiggling. Crazy, huh? Now come on, let’s play badminton!”

Now here we are, without a root cellar, and a backyard deck filled with angry gourds that are prepared to pelt our house with 40,000 fresh tomatoes.

We should have seen it all coming. Summertime’s dangerous side effects revealed themselves in early August when we started rocking on the balls of our feet bumming everyone out that the supply of Summertime was running thin. Though it was still four whole weeks till Labor Day, we said, “Jeez, it’s only four weeks till Labor Day.”

The skull dancing came to a pause, and everyone nodded solemnly.

“I’m sorry,” we say this weekend to friends and family. “I got a little out of hand, and I dragged you guys into it, too. I didn’t realize Summertime was so addictive. I thought I could handle it, and I made a fool out of myself and of you, too.”

You know what I want? I'll tell you: All I want now is to return to my old life when I didn't expect so much out of life, when I wore flannel and went to bed early. That's all I want. Really it is. Burn the swim trunks. Dump the sunblock into the water supply.

Yeah, this Labor Day, as we defiantly toast to new beginnings, you, Summertime — your dastardly wares wrapped tightly to your wooden wagon — wobble past. 

“Till next year,” you say with a tip of the hat and a sinister grin.

We turn our backs to Summertime. We cinch the zippers tight on our windbreakers and lower the needle down on some old Sinatra. Take it, Frank:

And guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never end

My fickle friend, the summer wind …

“I just got outsmarted is all,” we say.

Friends and family solemnly nod. “We all did.”