Summer has been my favorite season for as long as I can remember. It was so special to me that I used to have a recurring nightmare in the spring of each year. In the dream, I awoke on a late autumn morning and looked out the window to discover a gentle snowfall gradually burying a layer of fallen leaves. In the dream I was demoralized to understand that I somehow slept through summer, missing it completely.
I had a corresponding daydream in the autumn of each year. In this daydream I strolled along the soft sand of a California beach, soaking in the ubiquitous sunshine and laughing about the weather reports of an early snow back home. I was California dreamin’ to the point of obsession. My love of the Beach Boys’ music dovetailed nicely into this infatuation.
Two years after our wedding, my wife and I temporarily left Park Ridge, my home of thirty-six years, and moved to Los Angeles. It was sort of a proof of concept for a more permanent arrangement if we found our experimental home to our liking. We lived the California dream for three seasons. It rained once during that time—while we were sleeping.
It's not difficult to know where you are. Knowing when you are depends upon clues that we take for granted in the Midwest. Weather plays a big part in that. The weather on the West Coast was quite nearly perfect, being eighty-two degrees and sunny with a gentle ocean breeze. It was the same every day. Monotonously the same. Always. It began to drive me crazy.
Pangs of homesickness hit hard and fast. Several weeks into our endless summer I wrote to the offices of the Park Ridge Advocate to request a long-distance subscription. I had never before read that local tabloid so passionately as I did during the few weeks when spring blossomed back home. In the 1980s we couldn’t FaceTime with family, launch YouTube videos of weather reports, or stream our favorite news anchors on WGN TV. We wrote letters and made phone calls on landlines. It now seems so unimaginably archaic and difficult.
Later during our summer away, like the one in the dream I missed, Mother Nature began to tamper with our escape. Historic rains hit the Chicago area with flooding unlike any in recent memory. We turned on the nationally televised news and saw video footage of National Guard troops stationed a few blocks from our house in the northwest corner of Park Ridge, patrolling intersections flooded by the cresting Des Plaines River. Houses up and down our block began flooding so quickly that there was no time to rescue items from their basements. And the basement was where we stored everything we owned while we were away. By some miracle, our house escaped the flood. A few inches or feet in elevation may have made a critical difference, or houses closer to the river and further down the street absorbed the water, diverting it from ours.
To further our angst, a series of earthquakes began rattling southern California. Meteorologists, with little else to report from day to day, began covering the “earthquake weather,” a term applied to conditions that made even seasoned Angelinos nervous about an imminent “Big One.” Once again, despite disconcerting temblors above six on the Richter scale, we avoided disaster.
You know how they say, “Someone is watching over you?” Yeah, it felt like that.
As the California summer officially began, there were no indications in the air or trees (what few there were) around us of the changes I had come to expect in the town where I spent my childhood. There was no opening of the swimming pools, no nightly summer concerts, or endless chase for fireflies at dusk in the hot and sweet-humid air. There were no seasonal Dairy Queens or thunderstorms, no chorus of crickets or cicadas signaling the onset of mid-summer heat. Absent was the contagious excitement produced by an unexpected summer day in early May and the anticipation of more to follow. Our late evening walks through Hodges Park by the light of gas lamps, the moon and one tall white church steeple were missing. We came to feel that an endless summer was not special at all.
Predictability made the abundance of perfect weather seem boring. Summer to us had always been a crescendo of life on a reborn Earth, not a lingering sameness to be taken for granted. Our Midwestern roots began to twitch and call us homeward.
As the Fourth of July approached, I read that for the fifth year, there would be no fireworks display in the City of Park Ridge to celebrate Independence Day. They had fallen victim to budget cuts. When the change first occurred, I wrote letters to the editor, expressing my dismay at their absence. Others felt similarly and joined the movement I attempted to start. I even promised to match donations to a fireworks fund should one emerge. I created flyers that I delivered door-to-door. This was decades before a GoFundMe campaign could have made a difference.
Since the fireworks’ demise, summer wasn’t quite the same. Each year the number of illegal backyard explosives increased and I, guilty as any, wondered if my luck would hold for another year or if I would fall victim to an accidental injury, yet another statistic.
I recalled fond memories of earlier times I spent gazing skyward, laying on the grounds of Maine East High School, blades of grass tickling my neck as sparkling colors mingled with the stationary stars, colorful clusters bursting in the darkness to rain down upon an awestruck crowd.
I was now forced to take solace in knowing that a display would be staged near the cliffs at Santa Monica. We parked the car as close as we could and walked the remaining mile to the ocean. Gazing out over a sea of bobbing heads, we became two of the tens of thousands of spectators for a mediocre fireworks show, launched out over the Pacific from bunkers on the beach below.
I knew that night that we must go home. There was no hometown atmosphere to be found in that distant place. There was no feeling of community. Any sense of patriotic spirit kindled by fireworks displays in California vanished like so much Hollywood tinsel in the wind. I vowed that night to work toward a rekindling of the feelings of wonder and belonging I felt as a kid while watching the symbol of summer that, for me, fireworks had become.
Granted, that symbol evolved as I grew older, and where I once saw only midsummer magic, I soon began to notice the colors, the flag, and the feeling of relief I experienced upon returning from some distant country. And once my wife and I were expecting our first child, the symbol evolved further. It seemed increasingly important to me that those fireworks, patriotic symbols, and the hometown that displays them, along with the procession of neighbors with their lawn chairs and blankets, should all be together every Independence Day when our American community is allowed to assemble and share a feeling of belonging and pride.
We arrived back in Park Ridge that year just in time for the first snow of the season. Summer was gone. The nightmare had come true. But had it? Our absence put me deeply in touch with many things. I cherished the snow for the yearly change it represented. Christmas lights and fireworks became proper indicators for their respective seasons. And viewing these things, as if through the eyes of a child, I felt young again and knew I was home to stay. I would never again take these things for granted.
And that baby we waited for? I know that he appreciates the blessing of an American life in a city like Park Ridge, learning along the way about Family, Faith, and Community. I guess that's where our job as parents began. Like me, summer has always been his favorite time of year, no matter where in the world his career has taken him. After all, what better time to be born than the first week of July, for another Native Son?
