Gettin’ Through the Dog Days
We sit just now smack in the middle of the broad flat belly of summer, and everywhere you go, you see babies in nothing but diapers, curling and extending their fat bare toes heavenward, letting a thin line of baby-drool slide down their bare tummies. Happy those babies look; cool too.
I live in Massachusetts, the feisty little state that grew a shoulder on the map and dared the Atlantic to a bout of arm-wrestling. In summer, a lot of folks around here shinny down that shoulder, past the elbow of the Cape and clear on up its cocked hand. Or, they migrate north toward Maine, or New Hampshire and Vermont, vacationlands all; or south and west to Connecticut and Rhode Island.
Not us though. So things can get mighty quiet around here, and if you have kids, and the older siblings are off at camp, you might just have one little boy left behind, with nothing to do and hours to fill.
That was sometimes the case in this house. A child who had been accompanied literally since birth by a benevolent circle of sweet-smelling older sisters was suddenly flying solo. So while I would be squeezing my eyes shut and praying to get down one more paragraph for my work-from-home job, he would be standing at my elbow saying, “Will you be done working by the time I count to 50? To 100? Mom? To 100, M-o-o-o-o-m?”
One Monday I put in phone calls to every kindergartner we knew looking for a playmate, including one 60 miles away, just to see if by any chance his folks might be bringing him back for a few days. I tried to sound casual.
I didn’t feel casual. I felt desperate, like person inches away from trawling on the public streets in her car, dogging potential playmates for her son. (“Kid, hey kid! Listen, wanna have fun? C’mere, kid!”)
It was degrading and I felt like a fool doing it, at least partly because I knew I was living wrong. This desperate manic stuff is what we Northerners do in winter. In summer we’re meant to find a cool spot and drink plenty of liquids; stretch out and watch us some baseball.
But there I was on our screened-in porch this one day, my little boy's breath hot on my arm. I looked up at the sprinkler on a neighboring lawn. It was the kind with a head that shoots up full of pressure and turns LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT like a cartoon person watching a lightning-fast tennis match, throwing water all the while. I looked across the street at the other, more old-fashioned kind, which slowly, rhythmically, visited a fine curtain of water first on this side, then on that. It looked like a lady's feathered fan to me.
I looked at the first again, then back at the second. I looked down at the patient breathing boy. “Come on,” I finally said. “Let’s put on our bathing suits and go drool down our own tummies.”
It was the best idea I'd had all day.
And I didn’t even have to squeeze for it.