I find myself awake at the ungodly hour of 3 am. As I sit here in front of ‘The Precious’ downing heartburn medication and wishing for sleep, I realize that for most of you it is still yesterday. Time is funny, the way that on any given day it can be two days at once in different places.
Yesterday, or rather today for you people, was a special day. It was Charlotte’s 40th birthday.
This event reminds me of the slipperiness of time and obviously how old we’ve all gotten. See it wasn’t all that long ago that four adults (our parents) hit upon a great idea to ease their summer woes. Two families, eight, yes count them, eight kids and a whole summer of ‘I’m bored’, ‘it’s hot’, ‘what are we going to do today’, ‘he hit me’, ‘no I didn’t’, ‘yes you did’, ‘nah uh’, ‘yes huh’, ‘I’m telling’…. stretching before them. You see the problem.
At some point, the two sets of parents decided to pool their resources and combine the group. This brilliant idea seems to have cut down on the boredom and doubled the fun for the 8 lovely children. I’m not sure when the first ‘San Diego’ summer was or even when the last one was or even how long these visits lasted. Like I said time is slippery. But those summers stand out in all of our memories as unique gifts given to us by our parents. When we get together these days and relive our memories of those summers, they seem to all blend together into one giant summer of fun and exploration, all one unending memory where the years don’t really matter as much as what we remember. Now keep in mind that there were eight of us and that eight different memories have over the years crafted the collective memory of those summers. Each of us taking away our own impressions and lessons, but over all those impressions seem to have been mostly positive.
Those were summers of learning to roller skate and bike riding, beach trips and (with Rich in the family) emergencies. Summers where we four older ones worked hard and in vain to ignore and separate ourselves from the four younger ones. Summers of trying to scare the holy crap out of each other jumping out from behind shrubs in the dark and damp nights. Summers before parents were afraid to let their kids play outside let alone play up and down the street in the night. Summers of overexcited kids sleeping on the back porch, pancake breakfasts that ended messily, skateboards being used in unorthodox ways leading to close encounters with garbage cans, roller-skating daredevilry that would have turned our parents hair even more grey had they known what we were up to, big scrapes followed by quiet and clandestine bandaging, rendered with whispered admonitions and swearing of silence (on pain of pain), but above all they were summers of unforgettable fun.
It brought us closer as a group and made the lessons of childhood a group lesson so we didn’t have to repeat many mistakes. (We basically let the two boys handle the dangerous lessons.) (Yeah there were only two boys in the group, holy cow; they must have an interesting perspective on those summers.)
Anyway, it’s through the glass of those summers that we watched ourselves and each other grow up. It’s through those times that our relationships were forged and that we became entangled, for good or ill, in each others lives. So to say happy 40th to Charlotte seems to bring out more memories than I can here relate. If you want to hear stories join us at family events where we drag out all those memories and pass them around like shiny beach pebbles polished over the years by all the hands that have handled them. We were a mostly happy group of kids and we seem to have grown into a mostly happy group of adults.
And now it seems that us four older ones have managed to separate ourselves from the younger four at last. We four older ones are now officially in our 40’s. One peep out of you other four though and I think we can still manage to come up with ways to torture you. So here’s to you Charles, I raise my glass (of Mylanta) in a toast to you, happy 40th honey. I miss you.
That is all.
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