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What is it about summer that fills and yet drains us?

You say it’s the heat and certainly that defines it. It’s the close intensity of the sun through a hazy sky. Sharp shadows. Fuzzy memories.

Summer was our youthful promise of immortality. It began at the exact moment of the final school bell in early June. It proceeded through endless days of hitting baseballs and jarring polliwogs from the slippery, slimy-green drainage ditch that ran through our neighborhood like our own private subway.

Summer involved rolling down grassy hillsides, giggling, wearing only shorts and then being itchy all day.

Summer made necessary running through lawn sprinklers, wherever we found them inviting us in.

The entire neighborhood played hide-and-seek. No place was out of bounds. It might take half an hour to find kids scattered behind parked cars, perched in trees and jumping fences to race through neighboring backyards.

“OLLY-OLLY OXEN FREE!”

Summer evenings frequently found us in front yards on blankets. The entire family was there and neighbor kids and sometimes their parents, as well.

We’d look through the grass for four-leaf clovers and watch Venus follow the sun into a darkening horizon. We looked for shooting stars and UFOs. We drank Kool-Aid and talked about what we wanted to do tomorrow.

The cricket chorus began at full darkness as the Delta breeze arrived from the Golden Gate. Shortly after that Mom said it was time to come in and take a bath. The truth is, I didn’t really mind. I was tired.

And I wanted tomorrow to get here fast.

Mel Gibson is a bug. He needs to be squished.

He is famously handsome, funny, lovable, talented and wealthy.

Which is why he must now be squished.

It’s what we do to our icons, right? We make ’em bigger than life, take away their material needs, and leave them alone to wrestle with their inflated emotional needs.

It’s the deal with the devil, the price of fame and fortune.

And then, when they get as rich and famous as they’re going to get, when we’re about finished with them when they stumble and we can smell the fear, we jump on them like a pack of wild dogs.

“‘Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!'” *

There is no excusing or justifying Mel’s behavior but there is a reason for it. I don’t know what it is. It suggests a raging psychosis that must be chemically treated and held in check. But, hell. I don’t know. How would I?

How would you?

I don’t care what happens to Mel Gibson. Well, I do care but only in an abstract way. What I care about more is the cheap thrill we get from the pervasive, nonstop media airings of Mel and Oksana’s dirty laundry.

It relieves us to mock and spit on our icons.

Who cares if Mel eats a bullet?

And while we’re at it, send that booze-sucking slut, Lindsay, to jail and throw away the key.

We made them. When we’re finished playing we’ll destroy them.

“The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering.” *

Lighten up, it’s all in good fun. These people aren’t real people, we invented them.

It’s not my fault Michael Jackson was weird; I didn’t kill him. He did it to himself. He was weird.

And I was finished with him, anyway.

“We was on the outside. We never done nothing, we never seen nothing.”*

It’s been a week. The story is old. Oksana will thrive. Mel will live or he won’t.

Who’s next?

“after all we aren’t savages really…” *

* William Golding, Lord of the Flies

© 2010 by David L. Williams, all rights reserved

I went grocery shopping yesterday and saved $29.75.

I know I did because it says so right on the bottom of the receipt just above the place where I am urged to take a customer survey online and become eligible to win $100. (That’s a package of hot dogs and a six pack of Pepsi these days.)

When did grocery stores become so damned chummy? A little small talk with the checker is nice but I don’t need to have an ongoing personal relationship with corporate Albertsons, Vons and Ralphs.

It really irks me to have to carry a special card identifying me as a Preferred Customer. In fact, I would be quite happy to be an Undesirable Customer and remain totally anonymous if I wouldn’t get hosed at the checkstand for refusing to become a subject of their marketing database.

Once I went shopping at a foreign grocery store in a different city.

“Do you have our rewards card?” the checker asked sweetly.

“No. Just go ahead and give me the ‘screw-you’ price,” I replied. I really did. I said it with a smile but I think it unnerved her a bit. Felt kinda bad about it. Kinda.

When I signed up for the coerced honor of being a Preferred Customer of our neighborhood Albertsons I lied.

That’s what these annoying, albeit minor, intrusions do. They force us to lie. I didn’t want the store to have my phone number so I made one up. It gave me a great feeling of smug satisfaction until the day I arrived at the checkstand without the card and was told, “That’s okay. I’ll look it up. What’s your phone number?” I told her I didn’t know it. Then, I broke down and admitted my rebellious perjury. I looked at my shoes as I did it. I half expected to hear an announcement a moment later on the p.a. system, “Manager to checkstand four…we have a liar at checkstand four!”

Not long after that I was back at the same store. When I told the checker (a different one, thank God,) I didn’t have my card she asked for my phone number and for some reason I don’t quite understand I told her my actual home phone number. I knew it wouldn’t work in the system but I just felt ashamed and wanted to purge myself of my well-deserved reputation as a known charlatan in Albertsons. Guess what? It worked!

My actual phone number was accepted and I was back in the good graces of the Albertsons Corporation! I was, again, a Preferred Customer, praise the Lord!

A moment later I realized why my phone number worked. Somebody else had fabricated a phone number and it just happened to be mine!

Now the checkstand clerks have taken to thanking us by name as a result of their marketing scheme database and as I turned to leave the store that sunny afternoon, awash in the warm renewal of smug satisfaction for having beaten the system the nice lady at the checkstand said, “Thank you and have a nice day, Mr. Martinez!”

Life is good.

3:12. Must sleep. Can’t.

Must.

It’s hot. Throw off the bedspread. Can’t feel the fan.

Such a pretty sound. But it’s so loud.

How can it go on like that all night? And so loud? Most birds don’t make any noise at night. None. Sun goes down, they shut up. This one’s different.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything. Think about something else.

I forgot to clean the porch, the front door. And the light globe, too. And the pine cones in the basket. Need to hose them off. Need to get the truck into the shop. Hope it’s not expensive. Can’t afford it. Don’t think about money problems in bed, don’t ever do that. Think of something else. Anything.

Damn, that bird is loud!

“Dammit!”

“I know, Honey. Try to go to sleep.”

That was lame. Try to go to sleep?

3:14. Relax. Let your mind relax. Stop looking at the clock. Don’t think at all. Wait for the weird thoughts, the weird semi-dreams that morph into REM sleep. Don’t clench. Relax.

How many different types of birds is it mocking? How many different songs is it singing? Fascinating, actually. But so loud! Louder than the party and the fight on the street the other night when we called the cops. The bird is actually louder than a bunch of fighting drunks!

Still, it’s such a pretty sound. I’ll probably miss it when it’s gone. Won’t be able to sleep. LOL.

Wish I could call the cops on the bird. Wish I had a pellet gun. No, I don’t. Of course I don’t. Wouldn’t shoot it. Couldn’t find it anyway. It’s in a tree outside, hidden by moonshadows. It’s everywhere. Sounds like it’s right here in the bedroom. It’s out there.

3:46. What? Must have dozed off. But I don’t remember, so it doesn’t count. The bird is still singing. Carolann is thrashing and moaning.

It’s cold. The fan is cold.

Pull up the bedspread.

Relax.

Nearly sixty years ago my dad did something that seems pretty goofy now, but at the time we were all amazed and impressed. He was very proud of himself.

This was back in the fifties when TV was black-and-white, we only had two or three channels and a huge number of American households didn’t even have a TV yet. Nobody had more than one. That would have been as silly and pointless as having two cars!

TV commercials in those days seem quaintly funny in retrospect. Some seem flat-out unbelievable. Click here and check this out:

“More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!”

The commercials annoyed my dad. Not the messages themselves, just the fact that there were any. He thought all TV programs should be absolutely free. I don’t know if he ever considered why anybody would bother to create them if they were.

I don’t think it bothered him much that his favorite program, The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, was presented by the Gillette Safety Razor company. Boxing was purely formatted and made sense: three minutes of two guys trying to kill each other followed by a one minute commercial and then back to the fight.

I think Dad felt that having us watch a commercial in that situation was more a matter of respecting the fighters’ private dignity than commercialism. I think he also figured — as an afterthought — it was better that his six-year-old son watch an Old Spice commercial rather than be subjected to the between-rounds visuals of two guys sweating, bleeding and spitting teeth into a bucket while receiving one minute of facial reconstructive surgery as fat men yelled at them before they go back out to resume the effort to kill or be killed.

Dad was sensitive like that.

Incongruous as it seems now, any of these commercials might have popped up between fight rounds. I remember them all:

“Bosco gives me iron, and sunshine vitamin D!”

But Dad seemed to think that TV commercials were essentially the same thing as somebody intruding on our private home life. It was almost as if John Cameron Swayze or George Fenneman were making a habit of walking right into our living room every few minutes and interrupting our evening’s family entertainment.

So, what did he do?

My dad invented the MUTE switch!

I kid you, not.

Decades before the invention of TiVo and the insufferable mysteries of universal remote control units, my dad attached a long cord to one end of our TV’s speaker through the rear of the console. The other end was attached to a simple two-position plastic switch that allowed him to click the sound on and off at will!

Sure, we still had to watch and wait for the commercials to end but we didn’t have to actually listen to stuff like this…

“That’s a woman for ya! I ask her to get my shirts whiter… “

© 2010 by David L. Williams, all rights reserved

It’s the pause in our week. It’s the moment we put down our worries, responsibilities and busy thoughts.

Just for a moment.

— My hummingbird is sipping nectar from the backyard feeder I filled last week. He goes away and comes back for seconds.

— The barbecue smoker stands proud and manly on its pad, ready for the lovely babyback ribs it will soon receive and slowly perfect over the long, busy day.

— Over breakfast as my wife is hurrying off to work she has this conversation with the seven-year-old:

“That’s a nice outfit you’re wearing, Nana!”

“Thank you, Sweetie!”

“It looks really old!”

— I drive to the newspaper stand outside the donut shop on Route 66. The usual crowd is there, old men with their coffee and cigarettes enjoying the chilly morning air, the rising sun and each other’s company. Some read newspapers. One has a racing form. They all sit alone at separate tables while talking to each other from the privacy of their individual space.

A similar scene is going on at the nearby Starbucks but it’s an entirely different crowd. They have lattes and laptops. No smoke; less conversation.

The sun is fully up. Yard sales are underway.

I have things that need doing and it’s time.

Saturday morning is fleetingly sweet and perfect. I pray for another one next week.

© 2010 by David L. Williams, all rights reserved