By Wayne Allensworth
The picture remains embedded in my memory. An old man — my paternal grandfather — touching a name carved into a stone wall. The wall was a monument erected to honor fallen servicemen from Houston. It was early summer and hot, as sticky hot as it gets down there. It was the only time I ever saw him get emotional about the loss of his oldest son, my namesake, in a time that was already — this was 40 years ago — so long past. But now I understand that the past can be ever present. Some things are better left there. And there are some that never could be and shouldn’t. They make us who we are. “My boy,” he said. His fingers ran over the name and then his hand fell by his side, and he walked away. I pretended I didn’t see. I didn’t say anything and never mentioned it to him. I left him to his memories, his dignity intact. He was not long for this world. He didn’t last after my grandmother passed away. He fell asleep, never to awaken.
That’s a memory of a summer past that will never fade. But there are so many others, so many bittersweet memories, so many happy ones, and some that are both. Some are funny, a smile captured in a dreamy vision. A box of pictures can trigger a panorama of events, a flow of being that I can slip into for just a moment, drifting in its current. Life memories that go by so quickly. It’s like taking a dip in a pool and drifting down to its depths before surging up through the silence, bursting through the surface and returning fully present.
It was the summer of 1976. One among many, but an eventful summer that calls me back so strongly. It was a watershed time for all of us — the summer before our senior year in high school. I worked on a landscaping crew with some of my friends. I spent a lot of time, working in the heat, at a townhouse development on Memorial Drive. We didn’t seem to notice, as we were young and resilient. Some of the Mexican guys in the crew sometimes slipped away to fish in a bayou that meandered behind the development, a great green canopy above, swathed in Spanish moss. And my buddy B— would regularly take a truck to mow at an apartment complex on Westheimer. One day he had been gone for a long time. I drove over to see what was up. He was pushing the mower back and forth near the swimming pool, a bit slowly, his gaze diverted from the path he had cut in the thick St. Augustine grass. He was a big guy and hard to miss. I soon learned why he lingered. I walked over and it was quite a scene. Some dancers from Westheimer’s “Gentleman’s clubs” were sunbathing and were not, shall we say, leaving a lot to the imagination. We both got an eyeful. And we looked at each other and laughed out loud. The kind of laugh only friends can share.
Me sitting on my 1970 Camaro.
At lunch, sometimes I took a work truck and drove to visit a certain young lady. Unannounced, I was just moved to go. And sometimes she was home, sitting on the curb outside with some of her friends. She was the sweetest girl. I think of her when I hear this song, which played on the radio one day when I was driving to her house. What ever happened to those Daisy Jane days and the deep affections of youth? Yet I can still call them up, or maybe they call on me, when a song plays and a memory as vivid and poetic as ever materializes as if it never left me. Those feelings you have when you fall in love for the first time.
What a summer. Anticipation and joy. Graduation ahead, and then, who knows what? You lived in the moment, without thinking about it, for thinking would ruin the exhilarating sensation of living, and a certain sense of wonder. A group of us would drive down to Galveston in the night. We were in J—–‘s jacked-up Mustang, music blaring, ranging from Willie Nelson to Peter Frampton, who was really coming alive in the summer of ’76. We had some gigs in the car for fish or frogs, and a light to see what you were doing in the dark. I think it was my friend B—- who put the light on his foot and walked out into the surf, the glow making an eerie halo in the water. You could sleep on the beach then or punch it and drive your car up on the side of the Sea Wall, the night flying by you, the wind whipping through your hair. The nights never seemed so clear, as bracing, as meaningful as they did then.
Galveston 1970s
After the Senior Prom, I ditched my white tux and took off in my big brother’s maroon Chrysler Cordoba (left, in the picture), which he lent me for the night (remember those commercials when Ricardo Montalban boasted of the “rich, fine, soft Corinthian leather” of the Cordoba’s upholstery?). We drove to the beach. It was May, with summer coming on again, approaching like a friend you missed and longed for. A bunch of us gathered there and spent the night. Every one of those nights seemed to take place on another plane. You felt so alive.
I met my wife on a summer day in August. We both loved summer and the sun. Galveston, the beach. Everything seemed brighter then, a vast horizon of potentiality lit up by a summer smile.
A picture. A song. A bright day. And I’m there all over again. Then you hear the hectoring voice that insists that you have things to do. I have promises to keep. But miles to go — hopefully many more miles, many more summers — before I sleep.
Have a great summer.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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