Summer Dreams
A long and exhausting Tuesday finished happily at 7H with a visit, Lillie running in and jumping up in Kristen’s lap, standing on a stool looking out at my Bay, pointing a lamp and asking, ‘sat?
Closing at Ferucci Ristorante for family supper beginning with a bottle of Peroni, my first Italian beer, quite good --
-- cup of their matchless tomato soup, a beautiful and more than ample serving of snapper topped with capers, succulent spinach, small side of spaghetti with tomato sauce. Black coffee with their incomparable ricotta cheesecake. Some kid in a highchair left a terrible mess on the floor at the end of our table, but it must’ve been there before Lillie arrived. Home for 9 1/2 hours sleep. Wakeup of black coffee and crack of die wunderfullen Schokolade mit Orange. Breakfast from last evening of half my snapper, bit of spinach and spaghetti, still lovely this morning.
Calm Bay, 82.4° 72% and light blue sky, white at the horizon. Hazy beyond Shell Island looking into the Gulf. No air movement but what the box fan stirs. A man in orange shirt and tan cap down there wading and casting for his breakfast.
Anytime we go out for supper the ankles later report my having eaten too much salt, therefore dessert this morning of furoforty and leftover sip of black coffee. Ice cream after Linda leaves for her dermatology appointment? Not if she reads this first.
So WTH is this, some kind of confessional or sappy diary?
“Summer Dreaming” features an article on a page of this morning’s PCNH, picture of peaches, one sliced succulently open. I also have summer dreams from decades and innumerable years ago. One summer, it was 1954, I worked seven days a week job with another boy my age, delivering linen to the cottages that were Edgewater Gulf Beach
resort at the time, dozens of one story brick cottages, duplex and triplex. Every evening I had a date with Linda. One morning she picked me up at home early, drove me to work, and we cooked breakfast at Wayside Park
and went swimming after. It was the time told here before that, having waded far out, we spotted a huge shadow, a large shark cruising between us and the shoreline.
resort at the time, dozens of one story brick cottages, duplex and triplex. Every evening I had a date with Linda. One morning she picked me up at home early, drove me to work, and we cooked breakfast at Wayside Park
and went swimming after. It was the time told here before that, having waded far out, we spotted a huge shadow, a large shark cruising between us and the shoreline.
One hot workday a lucious turquoise 1954 Imperial sedan pulled up beside me, my cousin Bill showing off our grandmother’s new car. Not this color
This was replacing the 1952 Imperial that two years earlier, both of us still in high school, we had taken out on Pensacola streets late nights while our grandparents were at friends for the evening, playing canasta or poker. High speeds in a hot car 180hp V8. College by now, those adventures were gone forever, but not their summer dreams. Bill died in 2004. Our first cousins, he and Margaret Ann Gentry were raised by our grandparents after their mother died in July 1939 while I was staying in Pensacola while my brother Walt was born. Another summer dream of memories, late evening after everyone else in the house was asleep, our aunt Mildred (DeeDee) taking Margaret Ann, Bill and me into the living room to see their mother in her open casket. I can hear DeeDee saying, "Isn't she beautiful."
There’s more to the summer of 1954, maybe I’ve remembered here before. Linda and i had a date every single evening all summer, to the eventual distress of my parents and apparently hers also. One night we decided to appease parents by not having a date the next evening, to cool it and stay home. Arriving home from Edgewater, I telephoned Linda. She was not staying home afterall. A boy from Alabama was in town, had called and asked her out and she had accepted. "Ostensibly" (cough cough) this wasn't known the prior evening when we decided no date tomorrow evening; "ostensibly" (cough, cough, choke, gag) “mama made her accept” (anybody want to buy a clear deed to Hathaway Bridge, I’ll sell it cheap and you can start charging toll, SHMG, you can believe me on this one). Instead of relaxing at home with my family for the evening, I went up to the back alley, picked up glass bottles and jars, dozens and dozens of them, and with words that I only heard again years later in the U.S. Navy, smashed every gardenia glass bottle and jar in raging fury of, “I gave up my girlfriend for you, and now this.” Against my raging distress, my mother tried to console me explaining that Lucy was just trying to be a good mother. It didn't sell. That boy was a Money & Banking major at UAlabama. The next time he called, Linda’s mother had to tell him, “O Linda’s married and has a baby.” I protested, “We have two children, why did you say a baby?” Her answer was not satisfactory then and to this day.
Summer Memories: some delectable, some nasty.
DThos+ still mucking along in +Time+