Searching for the eternal endless summer

It's May already.

May 2, to be exact, and there was a time that would have meant an awful lot to me. When you reach May, you're in the home stretch of the school year, and you're counting the days till summer vacation.

When I was in elementary school and junior high in Ohio, school would end right around Memorial Day. Later, when we lived in Virginia, we went until about the middle of June.

And then came summer.

Ten weeks of nothing to do but enjoy yourself, to get up when you wanted, to go to bed late and to have fun outdoors from the beginning of the day till the end. Whether we were playing baseball at the crummy field we called "Eats it Field," swimming at the community pool or just hanging out, they were wonderful times.

Summer meant something special then, and kids all over the country dreamed of California summers as epitomized by the music of the Beach Boys.



That's the song that said it best, and it was so perfect behind the credits at the end of "American Graffiti." It's strange how quickly time passes, odd to realize that it has been 36 years since George Lucas made the film that asked the question, "Where were you in '62?"

Longtime columnist Bob Greene wrote a wonderful novel, his only one, about three middle-aged friends who tried to capture the wonder of summer one last time. Of course he called it "All Summer Long." He couldn't have called it anything else.

Some years ago, I asked my mother when the time comes that you feel different inside. When do you feel like an adult, or a middle-aged person, or a grandparent? When do you forget the things you enjoyed when you were young?

Her answer was that you don't change inside, but I know I have and not always for the better. You see, I don't look forward to summer anymore. Especially in Southern California, where summer can last seven or eight months, I find myself annoyed by the hot temperatures and sensitive to the bright sunlight.

We had two days in the middle of April when the temperature hit 100 degrees locally.

I didn't think it would be a great day to hit the beach, or just to lay out in the sun. I was annoyed and headachy.

I always loved the saying that everyone has to get older, but not everyone has to grow up. I still laugh at the same raunchy humor I did when I was 19, and I still love baseball better than anything in the world other than my friends and family. In many ways I'm still, God help me, a frat boy.

Of course, I make no apologies for that. It just manifests itself in things like trying to make a bet with my lifelong friend Mick on the golf course that the loser has to perform an unnatural act on the winner. He always gets horrified at the thought. Mick isn't a frat boy; he went straight from 14 to 45.

It manifests itself in refusing to kowtow to pompous people, and it probably hastened the end of my 30-year career in journalism last year. So just as getting into the working world made summer just like all the other seasons for me, leaving it made all the other seasons seem like summer vacation.

Either way, summer isn't special to me anymore.

The place where I used to play ball is now the parking lot for a big office building, and all my old friends are either gray-haired fathers or white-haired grandfathers.

The swimming pool is still there, but next summer it will be 40 years since the last time I went there, hoping to see the lovely Cheryl Newman in a bikini.

Yeah, we used to have fun all summer long.

Even the memories are wonderful.