This little essay is also being published in this week’s issue of The English Teacher Weekly, which I work on with my great friend and colleague Drew Campbell, as part of our “Summer Sizzler” series of reader-submitted pieces. If you have a summer story worth sharing, please consider contributing, and if you like what I share here, the odds are good you’ll enjoy subscribing to the ETW.
2012. The summer of the Roo cup. $6.99 for the cup and 25-cent slushie refills all summer long at all participating Kangaroo gas stations. My buddies and I made sure the Kangaroo at the foot of Signal Mountain participated. With gusto.
Always half-cherry and half-Coke for me. The ratio is fragile, and the slush comes out fast. It’s a feel kind of thing, like knowing how to fill up a gas canister without overflowing. Muscle memory. Practice is required. We stopped at the Kangaroo nearly every day.
17, going on 18. Ecclesiastes 3:11. “He has set eternity on man’s heart.” If you’ve been 17 going on 18 in the southeast suburban summertime, you know what that means. If you’ve stopped at the Kangaroo for a 25-cent cherry and Coke slushie on your way home from the Suck Creek swimming hole, 90 degrees outside, sunburned, pulling on your shirt to go into the store, your suit still damp against the driver’s seat, you know what that means. If you’ve driven to your girlfriend’s house in the evening with the windows down and the cicadas hollering and the lightning bugs flashing over fresh cut lawns as you drum out nervous jitters on the steering wheel to Blink-182, you know what that means.
“He has set eternity on man’s heart.” If you and your boys snuck into your neighbor’s pool for a silent swim after midnight and didn’t get caught, if you jumped in time to dodge the roman candle launched at the hot pavement under your feet on the 4th of July, if you got road-rash falling off your longboard riding the sidewalks of the golf course after hours, if you’ve felt the day’s-heat coming off your skin while holding hands under a blanket, pretending to watch a scary movie, pretending it’s no big deal, if you know the smell of honeysuckle and chlorine and gasoline and asphalt, you know what that means.
Some seasons are eternity-practice. An echo from a far country. 17 going on 18. June, July, August. The pool. The creek. The Roo Cup. The smell of someone grilling just down the street while the sky turns pink and orange and the evening comes down. All these little lightning bug flashes of a world without end, amen. Summertime.
Can relate! Beautifully written :)