Open summer, squeezed summer
— Photo by Dietmar Rabich
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
We seem to remember the arc of summers much more than those of winters. I remember many individual summers with vividness; they were all so different. But I recall the summer of 1970 with particular sharpness. I had just graduated from college and, trying to decide whether I really wanted to go to graduate school, decided to take the summer off, helped by a few bucks I had saved up. I had had summer jobs since I was 14.
It was still in many ways the phenomenon called “The Sixties,’’ with sex, drugs and rock and roll, etc. Wide open. While I was mostly living in Greater Boston that summer, I spent a lot of time driving around the Northeast alone or with my girlfriend of the time seeing friends, hiking, fishing, going to parties, etc. It was my last extended stretch of free time up until, well, now. I had a VW Bug and felt pretty close to fancy free, jumping into the car at a moment’s notice for a road trip to the mountains, the Maine Coast or New York City, often driving off in the middle of the night.
I would have felt more guilty about “wasting time” like this except for some advice my father gave me around that time, which was to take some time off before truly adult duties came rushing it. He had done the same thing in the summer of 1939, right after his college graduation and after having had all-day summer jobs since his early teens; in having these jobs, he was lucky – it was, after, the Great Depression. That fall he went off to work for an industrial company, then came “The War’’ (as we always called it), marriage and five kids. He had few breaks until he died of a heart attack, in 1975.
In any event, I decided not to go to grad school that fall and instead went to work, in a business – a Boston newspaper -- with long and unpredictable hours. Grab the free time if you can.
A cool day in late August, breaking a heat wave, is enough to get you thinking of the brevity of summer and indeed of life.
A Squeezed Summer
Mobility is often associated with America, whether in pursuit of money or pleasure. So perhaps what many of us will most remember from this summer is its COVID-caused lack, what with states imposing draconian quarantine rules, transportation service cutbacks, and many places you’d otherwise visit closed for the duration, or forever. It’s been a tough summer to gain that brief sense of release that summer vacations well away from home bring. Lucky people at least have leafy neighborhoods to stroll in, preferably with water to look at
If a vaccine really does come along, the anti-vaxxers don’t ruin everything and the economy improves, will there be a surge of travel next year, or will a newly aroused fear of disease scare people away from travel, especially long-distance, for years, however strong their urge to get away?