Can grown-ups have summer too?

Blue Hill, ME. A violist from Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival paints the view between rehearsals.

I bet you there’s a German word that describes the feeling of summer slipping by way too fast. It’s a feeling of unease that sneaks up on you as you chomp into a hot dog in July, takes on a tinge of panic in August as the car commercials multiply on tv, and explodes into full-blown grief in the fireworks of Labor Day. 

As a kid, the end of summer was the worst because it meant the beginning of school. I love learning but have never really cared for school. To add insult to injury, I usually procrastinated on summer homework (a horrible invention) until the last minute, which meant that I spent my waning freedom angrily resenting the otherwise-wonderful books that had been assigned. In those last days, I felt the shadow of the oppression to come and became resigned to my fate, the last phase of this German-word-feeling of a summer gone too soon.

By contrast, the summers were ultimate freedom. My favorite summers were those before teenhood, before summer school and awkward parties and the pressures of needing to make something of yourself. Back then, there was nothing on the agenda, except to be home by dinnertime so your mom didn’t call the cops (which happened exactly once). My brother and I usually went out to play with the neighborhood kids, roving the ambit of our suburban subdivision. We roved into neighbor’s houses to play with toys and video games, into yards and driveways to play basketball and kick-the-can, and into the creeks and bushes to climb trees and catch bugs and generally muck around. With permission, we roved down the road to the local rec center, toting towels for an afternoon of Marco Polo in the pool before traipsing back, wet flipflops slapping our raisined feet. 

Being home was fun, but even more memorable was going on summer trips. My dad being a professor, we had all summer to go places, so we did, as a family or with relatives and friends. Unless the destination involved an ocean, we drove, spoking out from Ohio via interstate into all corners of the United States - Florida, Maine, California. Our lodging being equally budget-wise, we camped. We’d drive until dark, pull into a campground, light up the propane lamp, and assemble our tent in the half-dark with tired but practiced coordination. If we were hungry, we’d boil some water on a butane stove and have some ramen - an electrifying salt bomb after a dull day in the car. Whenever we hit a city where we had friends, we’d stay in the lap of luxury, that is, a nice warm house with beds and proper bathrooms and sumptuous Chinese food. The contrast was ridiculous, but that’s how we rolled. 

Somewhere in New Hampshire with our trusty blue tent.

Whereas school made me feel like I’d been in a sleepy fog all day (though I swear I only slept through a fraction of my classes), summers were all about sensory experiences: the sweet juice of watermelon on my face as I spit seeds into the grass, the humid warm air that cushioned me to sleep every night, the flicker of lightning bugs in the dark, and the flashes of fish in the streams where we tried to hook them. Summer was when I finally noticed the world around me, and the earth I stood on. Only then, beneath lightless skies, did I contemplate that there was more, even, than Earth. The stars in a remote campground sky are startlingly bright, clear, and close, as if outer space is just a fabric wrapped around our planet. One day, I remember looking up and seeing a dusty grey-white amongst the stars. What a weird long cloud, I thought. Someone saw me looking up and noted how clear the Milky Way was tonight, and my head exploded - I could see the GALAXY WE’RE IN? I felt the enormity of time and space, and the insignificance of man, in that moment, while standing on a gravel road outside the campground bathroom, holding my toiletries bag. Perhaps there’s a German word for that feeling too.  

At some point, though, as school and work barged in, I stopped having a summer. I got a job after college at a consulting firm, a good job with good benefits, which came with a few weeks of vacation a year. A few weeks? I understood. As an adult, there is no longer any time to look at galaxies. 

I thought of all of this recently as I sat on my porch at dusk, trying to absorb the last rays of a sun that hit the hay sooner and sooner every night. I was on my laptop, working, trying to catch up after work hours so that I could keep up during work hours. My timer was the steady white-yellow glow of Venus; when it sank below the horizon, it was time to stop and go inside. As I raced against the spinning of the planets, I suddenly felt it again, that familiar sorrow. What was it? And why? I thought about it, now with the analytical and slightly hardened heart of an adult, and determined that what I missed most about summer, about a childhood summer, was two things: 1) the infinite possibility of unscheduled time, and 2) being outside. At that moment, I was hard-pressed to decide which I missed more. 

Can adults have a summer? We probably can’t have endless days of unscheduled time, nor our fill of all of the natural wonders of the world (if you’re living that life, drop me a line with some tips - thanks). But maybe it’s worth making more time for those kinds of moments. What I realized watching Venus in its downward arc was that I was most alive in those moments - when I was exploring without deadline; when I was gazing into a hot spring at Yellowstone and wondering how bacteria could create a Crayola-bright rainbow; when I saw meteors for the first time and was startled by their sudden brashness; when I found an author I liked at the library (never one that was assigned) and methodically read every one of his books on the shelf. Those are the moments that shine brightest in my memory, the moments that will make up the aggregate of my existence. In short, summer is when I best understand what it means to be alive, and to live a good life. 

I’ve found that it’s possible as an adult to have those moments, even if rare. One example comes to mind. It was during a summer I spent, in my 30s as a newly minted lawyer-turned pianist, at a music festival in rural Connecticut. I had been determined to spend my summer studying chamber music, and I got my wish. The days were busy, but gloriously so, filled with rehearsals and practicing and concerts, morning to night. The best part was that, as a pianist, I got my very own practice studio. It was one wing of a barn-like building set at the end of a very long driveway. My room had tall, white-washed wood walls, a Steinway and bench, and very little else. Since mine was the only piano studio there, and since pianists are the most maniacal instrumentalists about practicing, I was in the building by myself most nights. And being far from anyone else or anything else, I could practice as long as I wanted.

This space was mine, all mine!! (except for rehearsals with my groups).

It was in those nights that I found summer - hours to play through whatever music I wanted in the peace of a wooded countryside, with nighttime bugs piping up to fill the silence. When the night shone noticeably black outside my window, I’d break my reverie, pack up my bag, and walk through the trees back to my homestay to sleep and do it all over again the next day. I still remember the feeling of those nights - the joy of deep exploration, the freedom of open-ended time, the harmony of being alone in nature with just a white room and a piano. It felt, for those short hours, as if I had staved off the inevitable decay of summer, and in doing so, had found, instead, the essence of my life.  

Not quite totally outside, but closer than the usual practice spaces.