Ghost of Summer

  When I was a boy, I used to run bare foot most of the year, but particularly during the summer. And my best friend in the whole wide world at the time was Britt Lee Moore and he lived across the street from my house, in a small Southern California housing development a few miles from Long Beach.  No matter the many solemn speeches given by my parents about looking both ways and being careful before crossing the street, my sisters and I would still scurry across the road without looking; from time to time we would scare the hell out of some neighborhood parent driving on an errand as we’d darted out in front of their Buick. 

  Oh, we’d get yet another sit down lecture; they’d try to recruit fear into their convincing; looking all serious when they mentioned how we could get hurt …killed even.  Ha, we heard it before, to kid reality that’s the same consequence for not eating your liver and onions. So beyond a winking desire to obey our parent’s wishes born more by experience with punishment, any conscious choices to obey their rules would dissipate with a single minded survival impulse of getting off the blistering asphalt of the July sun.  Then, darn if on more than a single occasion, I'd catch that slip of asphalt extending over the cement curbing with my big toe.

Even now I can sense that spark of pain flashing behind my eyelids.  Oh and that baby would bleed like I was being murdered; I sounded off like I was too. The scabbed big toes of the neighborhood kids became the measure of the quality of any summer.   I'm writing about this from the point of view of my inner child, flinching with the fresh recollection.  You know back then, that kind of injury didn’t slow us down any; not a bit, we took it as just something we had to cope with.  No big deal.  I hear the howl of pain from a paper cut in a neighboring cubicle, and I think;

   “He’d not have lasted on my street in Westminister.”

Nope, they’d be a house kid; a ghost to summer.

I shake my head in amusement at how I consider those the sweet days of my youth?
What a funny filter that is.