As you read this, we are in the second day of summer, a season I appreciate (for all the life, the beauty, the cooling pool outside, the happiness of my animals) and despise all at once.
I never quite got out of the habit of thinking of years like school years. My real “year” still begins in September and ends in May and then there’s these additional three months that are supposed to be of rest. Yet, as an adult, summer means little. You must trudge on. And yet, I first knew summer as the months of rest—not so much play as many other children.
The summer also affects my writing in very negative ways. First off, though I was born and raised in Alabama, I don’t care for an overabundance of sun. When I use it as a metaphor I my plays, it is portrayed not as a beacon of light but a blinding nuisance—like the truth.
I can remember writing only one poem and one play during the summer months which, otherwise, produce little work. Even coming up with weekly subjects for the blog where I can literally let my imagination do its prairie dance, I struggle to find subjects. What movie’s turning 10 this year, 20, 30? Who died and did they mean enough to me to warrant a tribute? Boy, I can’t wait for that miserable month of August, famous for boasting no holidays of any kind, where I will struggle to not just post old material in order to satisfy a made-up deadline.
The poem I wrote was “August Night, 1972” (a fair one, I think), but it takes its imagery not from the naked light of day, but the hot summer nights of mosquitoes, fireflies, musky air, and lake water that is reminiscent of my childhood vacations on Lewis Smith Lake where my family went into a kind of time-share/condo-like situation with a double-wide overlooking the water (where now stands a $4 million mansion).
The play was an early piece of juvenilia that taught me what I write in summer is not worth reading. I happened to be acting the summer of 1998 in, simultaneously, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So, I did a musical take on the old Bard but with stock characters of mine—mired in loneliness, sulking in an empty bar and grill. Needless to say, Life’s Labor’s Love was never destined for eyes to see.
Later, summers turned to the emerald coasts of Destin, Florida on an almost yearly basis. Fresh gulf shrimp, pools, night grocery store runs, dinners at a restaurant overlooking the water. Rest. No work for the weary.
Then, adulthood and the mostly insignificant summers that accompany it.
The heat and humidity, the constant pool parties, the constant yard maintenance, the constant pool maintenance, the persistence of the dog wanting to go outside more and more.
I am always relieved when, sometimes as early as mid-October, a chill comes to the air, and I am back in the season I love most because of the rather better plays, poems, and essays take their life. I can do re-writes in the summer, but those passionate, spiritual, sorrowful, and joyous nights where plays emerge that were not there the day before—those first drafts full of rambling, wild life that need pruning.
Those all emerge when the sun is more of a white light, when the heat is on, the animals are cozy, and I am left with my imagination, blissfully alone.
One never quite remembers the limitlessness of one’s imagination.
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