A Sudden Summer Memoir



Hey! Bob, remember that time we went out to a golf course in the middle of the night? Maybe it was out by Spring Valley. I don’t know what we were thinking. Often we got our “best” ideas after midnight after being up for twenty hours. You and I weren’t partiers—just arty. Or, our parents might have said we were harebrained because many of our schemes followed little to no logic.

The night was damp with dew and our sneakers got soaked tromping over the hills. We left light footprints trailing us in the short grass. Stars stuck out like pinpricks against a backdrop of a black velvet sky. Did we talk? I don’t recall. We were friends, so we didn’t always need to. Or, you might have been telling me about an art piece you were working on. Or, maybe I was telling you a story, something I was writing.

Hey Bob! Do you remember cresting a hill? At the top we lay down on our backs to look up at the stars. We listened to the crickets, to the sprinklers shushshushing on the putting greens down below, to the sporadic hum of highway traffic. It was late enough that the bars were closed and still too early for regular people to wake up and get going. It was like we’d entered a slip in time.

And then we detected a sound not unlike crickets chirping, like sprinklers spritzing, like a motor purring—   Suddenly a bright headlight was bearing down on us!

We took off running with a creepy golf cart chasing us. That was probably forty years ago, and if we had to run like that today we’d be dead. Sometimes I go back to that damp night and the silence around us and the worlds we built, letting each other inhabit. Hey Bob, it is a privilege to have been included.
Bob used to run cross country
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