Take Me Out
She lay on the floor. On her stomach. The braided rug made tread marks from knee to elbow, grooves in her pale soon-to-be second grade skin.
She didn’t care about the ruts, the indentions.
No.
She was lost in summer, and she was on the floor, kicking her legs, her face too close to the television, dreaming of hot dogs and Cracker Jacks and a chunk of watermelon sprinkled with salt.
Watching baseball with her Dad.
Do you have a favorite summertime memory from childhood?
This post is part of the series The Soundtrack of Life. If this is your first visit to the series, please click here for the first installment, click here for the second, click here for the third, click here for the fourth, here for the fifth, here for the sixth, herefor the seventh, here for the eighth, here for the ninth, here for the tenth and here for the eleventh. MTM wrote a great guest post, which you can find here. Thanks for your contributions and insights in the comments. They always enrich this blog, especially in a series like this one.
Nothing too orignial andra but the smell of mown grass and eating gooseberry’s picked from Dad’s allotment.
Ah, the gooseberry. Jim, you bring back another summertime memory for me. Standing on the bank of my Mamaw’s creek, eating those things straight off of her gooseberry bush. Not even washing them. Thanks for that memory.
No worries Andra – they are lovely memories – although eatig raw rhubarb gave me awful stomach cramps. Oh to be 8 again and being scolded by mum for being so stupid!
Mine revolves around sports, not the organized kind, just pick up games. We would get about 4 of us and play what we called Indian Baseball which meant you could only hit to a certain area of the field and everything else was an out. You would play two on two and your own teammate would pitch to you and the other team would have to get 3 outs before your turn was over. Loved playing tackle football in the park with no pads and I did that up until I was about 14, this may explain more than a few things. Played basketball by myself or one on one or two on two every Saturday morning for 4 or 5 hours. Also worked in a little swimming and diving on the team at the local pool.
I guess I had a lot of energy in those days, whew!
Lou, you must’ve had a lot of energy forever. I am still laughing at “played tacked football in the park with no pads.”
I love photos of child Andra… I caught myself trying to enlarge it so I could get a closer look. I thought for a moment, and I remembered a day when my best friend and I went swimming in a relative’s above ground pool. I lost all sense of time… we spent hours talking and doing flips and handstands. And then we went home for lunch. We sat in my kitchen and had the best ham and cheese sandwiches ever. We had seized the day, and it was grand.
That’s a good one, Angie. Why is it that ham and cheese sandwiches tasted so much better after a day outside?
I have no idea, but I can still taste it.
Yeah, I’ve got one great summer in mind, but it’s a book length thought and I have sentence length time this morning
I hope you’ll write the book someday. I’ll buy it.
Too many summer memories to recall them all here, Andra. I often write about my Big Fat Greek Summers, with all the relatives converged upon our house, for that was summer! Harry Caray taking us all out to the ball game (I’m up here in Cub/Sox land) did mean long, er, conversations? late into the night in our backyard between my father, uncles, and whoever else stopped by discussing these two teams. A rather loud sport in itself.
I was a Braves fan growing up (proximity to Atlanta = 5 hours, so the closest professional team), but Harry’s son Skip called the games on tv and radio. (Maybe he still does. I don’t know.) So, Harry was something of a legend for me as a girl. Those glasses always got me laughing.
I’m not a huge baseball fan, but I always listened to the radio as I went to sleep, awakening always to the white noise in the night (and snap it off). I loved listening to The Braves games. And I have no reason to understand why. I knew nothing about baseball (and still don’t) but did like the voices and the crowd noises and he sound of the crack of the bat.
And love your opening lines in this.
I had almost no time to write this post, Cheryl, so I’m glad something writerly came out at the beginning.
I have many summer memories i cherish, but this one surfaced first – we are on my gradfathers wooden dock on Wadmalaw Island. This dock was a masterful collage of scraps of salvaged wood – a myriad of different colors, widths, and thicknesses. My five cousins, my brother and I spent an afternoon jumping of the end of the dock and swimming back to the ladder. Over and over again projecting ourselves through the air and into the cold green water. Summer.
I always love hearing the memories of the things you did with your grandparents. They were all such outsize personalities, and I love that kind of person.
Lovely moments,Andra. Favourite moments: fish and chips on the cliffs in Dorset. We all wore flares.
Now, I want fish and chips, Kate. Cliffs in Dorset would be an added bonus, but fish and chips……….swooning sigh.
I have been having a fish and chips craving recently. None of my family eat fish but me, so guess I am on my own…
When I can have a free (as in can eat what I want) meal, we will go have some fish and chips, Carnell. Should be by September.
Now THAT is a date!!!
Churning and then eating homemade ice cream. Nothing better, really. But now you can make it without churning it yourself. Even better.
Oh, I remember the days of being the churn. I still think the wooden one with the melting, salted ice and the turn crank handle made the best ice cream ever.
Well! This is my first visit and i shall have to go back and have a look at some of your other posts, my appetite is as they say Wet. Have a lovely day Andra! c
Hi Cecilia. Thanks for stopping by. May you have a lovely day as well.
My cousin and I used to spend our summers together. He lived in Tennessee and me, here in Charleston. Our parents would trade us off, so I would spend about two weeks with him there, and then he would come this way for about two weeks. We had a blast riding bikes everywhere, and doing all the various things that young boys do – from going to the beach to hanging out at the airport watching planes take off and land. Was a great time – not a care in the world.
This whole comment is a carefree summer. Meandering, unplanned fun.
My best friend’s family would summer in SC (Isle of Palms) and we’d spend 18 hours a day on the beach. So, even though I am not much of a beach person as an adult, grains of sand in my flip-flops – gritty under my feet – or collecting in the toes of my Keds, means summer to me. I look forward to ingraining that in my daughters too. More than anything, the smell on sunblock means summer to me, and I have been known to moisturize with a little Banana Boat in the wintertime to lift the blahs. And of course, since I am so food-centered … PB&J on white bread, Cheez-its and cold green grapes mean summer to me.
Amber, I never thought about the smell of sunblock reminding me of summer, but it always does. And, I love how you use it in winter to get rid of the blahs. That is an excellent idea.
If the pic of Elena this morning is any indication, you are well on your way to indoctrination.
My best friend Michael Arsenian and I used to spend hours when we weren’t outside playing baseball and swimming in the quarries in Rockport near his Grandmother’s place, playing APBA Baseball (a card game with dice – how primitive) tracking all our players stats for a full season. It used all the major league teams and based their performance on the season before. It was extraordinarily complex.
On the side we would write out our top 40 lists of music and see how we compared with WBZ-AM. . We had usually agreed until the summer of ’67. Two new “chick” singers hit the scene and he went for Janis while I, I went this way. (Love them both, of course but she was my first….)
We just got back from dinner with Lou Mello, and he and MTM had a lengthy conversation about these games. It was a great outing.
And, now I’m playing Grace, who I too have always adored. More than Janis. This one is great.
Grace rules. Absolutely.
Great clip . . . two of the best songs from the 60′s!
Summer memories are the BEST! Running barefoot through the grass. Picking fruit off the vine. Splashing through sprinklers. The crack of the bat against the ball. Biking to the swim club. Jumprope. Hopscotch. Jacks. Frisbee. Roller skates. Aah . . .
Nancy, I forgot how much I loved to play jacks until this very moment.
I’d do anything to have a day or two of summer with my grandparents at the beach. They taught me to love it, and my memories of walking to the donut shop in the early summer mornings with my grandfather have such a place in my heart! So many happy thoughts! Debra
Debra, that is a great memory. The scents of sugar and salt mingling in the air must’ve been something.
One of my favorite summer memories is from a camping trip we took when I was maybe 14? We went to a park on the Ontario side of Lake Huron and swam at sunset; little fishes started to jump around us as we stood in the water and watched the red fading in the west. Pretty neat.
And then harassing my brother and cousin. What more can you ask?
Swimming in a lake at sunset has got to spell summer. I did it in Kentucky once, but we couldn’t see the sun set.
Sleeping outside under the stars…but before we got to go outside and sleep in our sleeping bags, Sherri’s Mom would always tell us a story about some pycho who escaped from an insane asylum and would cut off children’s heads as they slept out under the stars if the kids were naughty (this lady was mean, mean, mean – I still have nightmares when I sleep outside – oh, and she used to tell us ferociously wicked horrifying stories about wolves tearing children limb from limb – ugh, yes, I’m still afraid of wolves and sleeping outdoors). Even though she freaked me out (A LOT) I still have fond memories of sleeping outdoors and waking up with either a swollen lip, or a swollen eye (sometimes both) from mosquito bites… Now I’m wondering why that is such a sweet memory? Perhaps because I survived it? Ha.
Surviving can lead to lots of good memories, I think.
so many snippets of memories flash when I read your question…one of my faves, though, I’d gather flowers and milkweed pods, take them back to the hut I’d made within the scrub trees that scrabbled between RR tracks and corn fields and pretend I was from ages ago living off the land getting ready to prepare a feast. ~
That is a gorgeous memory.