“Carlene, five more minutes and then it is time for you to do something.”
My mother’s voice reached me on the screened porch where I lay on the green-cushioned chaise. Do something? I was doing something. I was helping Nancy Drew solve a mystery, or delighting in an adventure with Mary Poppins, or just hanging out with Rufus Moffat. A few summers later I was rooting for Mary Lennox to coax her sickly cousin Colin into the secret garden or sobbing along with Jo, Meg, and Amy over the death of Beth.
My mother’s voice would come again and I would have to tear myself away and go “do something.” This was the annual summer battle that my mother and I engaged in over how much of the day I could spend reading. It lasted literally until I reached high school. Decades later, on a different screened porch, I still feel a twinge of guilt when I settle down to read during the day. “You should be doing something,” I hear her say.
I loved it when I got to ninth grade and was assigned summer reading—that counted as “doing something.” I remember wandering through the tropical forests of “Green Mansions” with Rima, an exotic teenager who met a male traveler and discovered mysteries of the past. It’s all very vague. I have never reread the book, so it still holds the enchantment it had for me then. It was during those high school summers that I met Dickens’s Pip and David Copperfield and Hardy’s Eustacia Vye and Tess of the d’Urbervilles and read the incredibly moving “Cry, the Beloved Country.” I have reread many of these books over the years, but it was those first readings that had an enormous impact and shaped many of my values.
Teaching was the perfect profession for summer reading. I spent my time alternating between binge reading and “doing something.”
A time for long novels
Summer was the time for those long novels where I could spend days in another world. (I’m not sure where my children or the dog or the laundry were those days I was gone, but they all seemed to fare OK.) One of those worlds was 12th-century England with its forests, castles, and monasteries as a setting for love and betrayal. Ken Follett’s opening line in “Pillars of the Earth” still gives me pause: “The small boys came early to the hanging.” Pat Conway’s “Prince of Tides” is set in the low country of South Carolina, where the main character searches his family’s dark and violent past. “The Power of One” by Bryce Courtney follows a young man through a childhood of prejudice in South Africa to a leadership role that helps him redeem the past. As Emily Dickinson said, “There is no frigate like a book/ to take us lands away.” Reading is an escape to a different world, but one learns a lot about oneself and other people and relationships while on the “frigate.”
For several years I looked forward to summer as a time I could pursue a relationship. I would find someone endearing, or a little edgy, or even a little scary, one I could spend a lot of time with and not have to go looking for someone new all the time. I wanted it to be an all-absorbing relationship but at the same time one I could easily break off come September.
I spent one summer with journalist and amateur detective Jim Qwilleran and his Siamese cats, the brilliant clue-giver Yoko and sweet, but not-so-smart Yum Yum (creations of Lilian Jackson Braun). The mysteries in the series were so tame as to hardly warrant the name, but I loved the cats, Qwill’s unique group of friends, and the restaurants he frequented. By the end of August, though, I was feeling kind of disenchanted—Qwill was getting old and a bit overweight (so was I), and I wasn’t too sorry when I had to break off with him.
Sins and nightmares
Much more unwholesome was my summer with Edward Delaney, a cop in New York City. The crimes were truly brutal, and I was in a constant state of suspense. Delaney was always drinking some kind of cordial, so after a while, I started joining him in a late afternoon glass of Drambuie. We went through a series of “Sins” together, starting with “The First Deadly Sin” (Lawrence Sanders). After number four, we ran out. It was just as well: Things were starting to get a bit smutty, and Drambuie was expensive.
One summer I gave myself nightmares over Stephen King. Images of teenagers on fire, a car with a mind of its own, a mad dog, and a reincarnated cat disturbed me, but I couldn’t stop seeing Stephen. The next summer I entered an even more bizarre relationship with Dean Koontz. “Watchers,” “Strangers,” and “Phantoms” came with him, and for a while I found it terrifyingly thrilling. Finally, it just got too weird and scary and I took out a restraining order—on myself.
Once I retired and could read whatever, whenever, summer reading no longer held the magic it once did. Still, there’s something special about spending a hot July day on a porch with an outbound frigate.
