Distant Summer Nights

This morning I had to wake my wife up at the ungodly hour of 3am so she could go to work early. I couldn't get back to sleep afterward, and lay there in the brilliant light of a full moon, listening to crickets.

My daughter had knocked her ear pretty badly on the playground yesterday, and asked me to sleep with her so she wouldn't roll over on it in the night. How can you say no? And why would you anyway? Her bed is pushed up to her window in such a way that when you lie there, your head is right next to the sill and the breeze can just glide over you.

So at 3am I'm lying there, listening to crickets I rarely hear anymore these days because I'm usually head-bent busy on whatever the day is demanding of me, right up until bedtime when I fall asleep in about ten minutes flat. No time for crickets and moonlit breezes.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the moon. Not just in the "gee that's a purty light" kind of way, but in that way that us science fiction geeks loved it. It was another planet, sort of. You'd forget that when you'd look at the cool covers of science fiction novels with their giant moons setting over hazy horizons, but we SF kids knew that with only a quick push of the will, we could dismiss the moon of poetry and remember that right there was this giant honker of a celestial orb hanging right there! No other planet has such a huge moon relative to it's own size - okay, Pluto and Charon, but they don't count for a bunch of reasons. Right there was an entire world so big and so close that with binoculars you could pick out individual craters, and yet you could still see the entire thing, edge-to-edge, and get a feel for how small and alone it is hanging there in the big void. It's a completely separate world, and it's right there.

I was born barely a year before men walked on the moon, so as I grew up in the post-Apollo era I was convinced, like most boys, that I was going to be an astronaut and would at least visit, if not live on, the moon. In late summer, when the weather was warm but the sun set early, I would as likely as not be outside exploring the woods around my house, surrounded by crickets and moonlight. They were long years of magical boyhood that Bradbury and Wells could depict and cater to so well.

And lying there this morning, watching the moon in the empty sky, listening to the rustle of tree leaves hissing in the occasional sigh of air, I realized how far I've fallen from that life of wonder and mystery. Summer is deliniated by calendar grids. Evening is the time to get the children to sleep and get to sleep yourself in the hopes of not being dog-tired in the morning. Books are for information or occasional entertainment.

But so much of the moment is gone.

Those days when you had so much time alone with your thoughts that you could think well through all the things you need to think of, and could dwell on the moment you were in, and the weird twists your imagination was taking you, and unconsciously revel in things as simple and common as moonlight, hissing leaves and crickets - those things get pressed out of you when you "grow up." I often think of our ancestors a mere 30,000 years ago, who were completely like us and yet had so few responsibilities beyond providing for their basic needs. There are estimates that they may have spent only 20 hours a week "working." And the rest? Not watching TV. Not driving to soccer practice. Not worrying about tomorrow's spreadsheet errors. They'd be sitting under the stars, being with their families, their friends, perhaps around a fire - they'd exist in their moments the way kids do.

In some ways it seems we've grown up as a society in the way we grow up into adults. I thought about my own daughter, lying there with her swollen ear, and wondering if she were imagining the same things about the other white world that spun overhead each night. What would she remember of these days?

You might be wondering where this is headed. Not really anywhere. I lay there for an hour until my alarm rang at 4:00, and got up to leave Luna and her chorus to my daughter's window. I have things to do before I go to work, and it may be months, or years, before I get some glimpse of my boyhood crouched in long, dark grasses again. But I know this is why I write. I want to recapture the wonder of the world I had when I was a kid. In some ways it works. And just possibly, one of my stories will be read by another boy or girl, twenty years from now, and it'll fire their imagination into the dark hours of a long summer.