We ate hot dogs off paper plates at the top of a grassy hill, ate as fast as we could, because eating wasn't the point, not the point at all, not tonight. We ran down the hill and staked out a spot and lay on our backs and waited for sunset. This is what we all did, even the older boys with their peach-fuzz Valentino moustaches and their learner's permits and their inscrutable slang, even the girls the boys were staring at, these loud-laughing, sunburned girls with their tank tops and smooth shins. No one was jaded tonight; the sky was the mirror of all our summer dreams. The fifes and drums, muddy through P.A. speakers, swelled and stopped; a hundred colors rained down but never reached us; the smoke-spiders crawled off and disappeared ...
Back then I always felt awful on Sunday nights during the school year, sick with the Monday ahead, queasy with stage fright at the performance—the performances!—to come: one for teachers, another for friends, one for rivals, another for strangers. In this way, I cheated myself out of a hundred pleasant Sunday evenings, and to this day if I see some rerun of an old Sunday show it brings back the sensation of long-ago acid reflux. There was, however, one thing worse than feeling the Sunday Feeling on Sundays, and that was feeling the Sunday Feeling for the entire six weeks between July 5th and the first day of school.
For me, the weeks between the end of school and the Fourth of July were one long, wondrous Saturday, filled with expectations of God-knew-what, expectations that, for the moment, felt like their own reward. It wasn't that I was waiting for the fireworks: I wasn't anticipating anything so small as a holiday, even this best of all holidays. Rather, I was enamored with a sense of endless possibility, the idea that the burdenlessness of summer could last forever, and if something wonderful wasn't happening, at least there was the possibility that it could.
For whatever reason, it was always the Fourth's last starburst that blew up my illusions. When the hillside crowd scattered and the boys and girls slid back into cool indifference and the mothers and fathers gathered their broods to beat the traffic, I was always overcome with a leaden sense that there was nothing more to expect, and that perhaps there had never been anything to expect.
Today, with year-round schools and endless day-care and the vacationless summers of two-income households, I suppose fewer kids will suffer my peculiar summertime cycle of expectation and disappointment and foreboding. I suppose I'm happy to spare them the feeling. But I suppose I'm also sad to take away the absurd, delusional faith that preceded it.