Summertime is like that brief moment when you first open your eyes in the morning, arch your back and stretch. You hold it. You purr luxuriously. You try to prolong the delicious feeling. But it never lasts.
I learned the harsh truth when I turned 12.
I grew up in Evergreen Park, surrounded by the neighborhoods that made up the South Side of Chicago. There were battalions of kids — children of war, baby boomers — swarming every block. Day after day, from the time I was awakened by the milk man opening our back door at dawn to the tingling of the Good Humor ice cream truck’s bells at dusk, we played outside, incredulous that we had an uninterrupted span of time without coats, parents or homework.
A kid’s concept of summer was of a vast, endless plain, filled with sidewalks for biking, trees for climbing and “prairies” (South Side jargon for vacant lots) for exploring.
We played free and wild, but always aware of not crossing that invisible line that would attract the attention of adults.
But it all went south in the summer of 1961.
With no parks in Evergreen Park, if you didn’t count the swing set in front of the volunteer fire house on Washtenaw Avenue, we would ride bikes to Chicago’s Beverly Park each morning to play baseball. We’d pack baloney and mustard sandwiches, a can of shoestring potato chips and a gallon of red Kool-Aid in a glass milk jug, which I’d precariously transport from my bike’s handlebars.
Sustenance was required because we’d play ball for hours. We would have played till twilight had our parents allowed us to pack our suppers as well.
But on a sun-soaked weekday in August, while in the second inning of a game with four boys on each side (a ball hit to right field was an automatic out), Debbie Glick appeared, settling on the bench behind the chain link fence along the third base line. She wore a peach-colored top and bright white shorts.
John O’Neill, playing shortstop, turned, cupped his mouth with his hand and informed everyone she was from St. John Fisher. Catholics lived in parishes back then; ours was St. Bernadette’s.
Mickey Michau hit a bouncer to Tommy Booth who was pitching. With only four on a team, it was “pitcher’s hands out.”
O’Neill was not great at baseball, but he was older than the rest of us and he knew things. Between batters, he decided to leave the infield and trot over to where Debbie Glick was hugging her knees, the heels of her Keds — no socks — tucked in against the white shorts.
O’Neill rested one foot on the bench where she was sitting in order to talk.
“There’s only one out, John,” I called.
O’Neill did not turn around. But Debbie Glick tilted her head up and gazed toward the outfield. She turned back to O’Neill and smiled at something he said. She rocked once from side to side on the bench. She fixed the cloth purse beside her and then threw back her head in order to smooth her long brown hair with her left hand.
I moved in a few steps from left field. We would play without him.
Sure enough, my brother Kenneth hit a slow grounder through O’Neill’s vacated position and stretched it to a double. I called time out.
The Kool-Aid jug sat in the grass in foul territory, against the fence and opposite the bench. When I got there, I could hear O’Neill gossiping about some boy on St. John Fisher’s basketball team whom apparently both he and Debbie Glick knew.
Is that what you talk to girls about?
I lifted the jug with both hands and took a long drink, and then a longer look through the glass bottom to see what was wrecking our game: One girl. With very white teeth. Sparkly earrings.
The cold drink left a sharp stitch in my gut. My eyes returned to her face, but the earrings disappeared momentarily when she leaned forward to nod and politely laugh at some other boring thing O’Neill said.
But there it was again, at the intersection of ear and slender neck. A tiny sparkle, glinting behind the waterfall of hair shining in the sun. A small and fragile thing but one that gave me a dizzy, floating sensation and forced me to reach out to the fence wire to steady myself.
I turned to where the others were walking toward our bikes that lay in the grass. I turned back, magnetized by the earrings. Debbie Glick’s bare knees touching each other.
Her eyes, omniscient fireflies, met mine.
O’Neill, yapping, oblivious.
Our game was ended.
September coming fast.
Summer, slipping away, would never be the same.
David McGrath is an emeritus English professor at the College of DuPage and the author of “South Siders,” a recently completed collections of columns on life in the Midwest.
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