Summertime is made for little boys

Hanging on my wall at home is poster-size reproduction of a Norman Rockwell “Saturday Evening Post” cover. A banner in the painting reads, “Summertime.” The painting depicts a boy holding a fishing pole, sitting on a rock.

My wife and I got that poster because we’re surrounded by little boys who remind us of that barefooted kid with his straw hat and cane pole. I’m sure my brother, who has two daughters, might argue the point, but to me, summertime is made for boys.

The moment school was out last month there was a fresh light shining in my sons’ eyes. They bore a glow of joy as they realized they had shed the confines of the classroom for a couple of months and had time now to do all of the essential stuff that kept getting put off thanks to non-essential school: walking barefooted in the grass, throwing the baseball and playing so hard that by the time bedtime rolls around they’re already asleep on the couch.

I get very nostalgic at the start of summer, and inevitably I am drawn to a summer in the early 1980s. I’m certain that my memory of that summer is skewed by time, but as I recall it now, I spent every day playing in the woods and creek with my friends, swimming at Sid Kitchens’ house, and nearly every evening catching fireflies with Joey Johnson.

I remember a few evenings, too, when I stood in the back yard trying to learn to mimic the call of a bobwhite quail.

There was a vacant field behind our backyard from where the quail used to whistle at me. It was a farm at one time, with an old, abandoned house in the middle of it. The house was fallen in and surely a haven for snakes and other dangers. It was forbidden territory as far as my parents were concerned, so I went there every chance I got.

Now that I am an adult, summer just means the weather’s gotten hot. Summer means cutting the grass in the heat, praying for rain to keep the grass alive, sunburns, mosquitoes and yelling at the children to close the door because, as my wife says, we don’t want to become financially responsible for cooling “all of northeast Georgia.”

But for little boys, summertime is magic.

What else, if not magic, removes from their lives the structure of school, the demands of homework and teachers and standardized tests?

Summertime means catching fireflies and pop flies; it means ice cream and Popsicles and fresh fruit; it means not having anything better to do than lay in the grass and look at clouds or drift in the pool for hours – summer, for children, is like a long, sweet dream and their only responsibility is trying to remember to close the door behind themselves.

Summertime means running through the sprinkler and splash fights in the pool. What potions or spells could a school teacher possibly create to try to compete with the magic of running through a sprinkler?

Summertime means running through the sprinkler and splash fights in the pool. What potions or spells could a school teacher possibly create to try to compete with the magic of running through a sprinkler? And if you stand over it, the water shoots up the legs of your shorts and you can laugh for hours about that. From the beginning of time, teachers never stood a chance against summertime.

What you don’t know when you’re a kid – running through the yard collecting fireflies in a jar – is that these days will someday end and summer will be nothing more than a hotter time of year with more chores to do around the yard.

I know that this awful realization still has not occurred to my sons.

Nathan asked me the other day when I would start my summer break. Harrison can’t understand why I still haven’t found time to go swimming with him (Harrison’s gotten big enough that I’m the only one now who can toss him bodily from the shallow end to the deep end, so my presence is still in demand in the pool). Robert, who just finished kindergarten, remains under the false impression that he’s been to school, learned everything there is to learn, and he doesn’t realize that this summer will end and he’ll be going back to school in August.

But because I know now what my boys will learn one day, I make every effort I can to see that they get the most out of summertime – particularly now that the three months of summer I looked forward to when I was a kid have been gnawed down to two months.

So when my wife tells me it’s time to call the boys in for dinner or it’s bath time and time for them to give up for the night, I start to act like a kid myself. I stall, I drag my feet, I go outside and get preoccupied with something else – anything I can do to delay just a few minutes for them. It’s summertime, after all, and little boys can eat cold dinners and, truly, if they’ve been in the pool, they really don’t need a bath.

Rob Peecher is author of the book Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings, available at Amazon.com. This column was originally published in 2007.