Rainy Day Children of the Summer

Kids in my old neighborhood found fun things

to entertain them during a summer storm from watching

the sidewalk steam away its heat to dodging raindrops

to call one another out to play.

The best part of being a kid on Gless Avenue in Belleville in the 1960s was having four cousins - Patsy, Tommy, Bobby and Lorraine - living next door, and about a dozen other kids all just a few houses up or down our dead end street.

For a few years, my Dad’s older brother Joe lived by himself downstairs from us after Gram died. Uncle Joe was old then, to me, anyway, and had no kids of his own, as far as any of us knew. And it seemed to us as if he was already retired, or simply too worn out to work anymore.

Someone called him a babysitter once because he had a half dozen kids and me playing on his front porch. He just smiled at the babysitter remark and waved his hands in a "suffer the little children" gesture.

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Chasing the mosquito man

For all the DDT -- Drop Dead Twice -- sprayed

on hot summer evenings, the killer fog never seemed

to eradicate mosquitoes (or lightning bugs). One always managed

to squirm through a tiny hole in the metal screen

and spend most of the night buzzing your ear.

I saw the greatest minds of my dead end street running into the blue mist of the sweet-smelling cloud behind the Essex County Mosquito Man's Jeep.

Summer in the 1960s, and the living was good.

Sticky fly paper hung over the Maytag wringer washing machine next to the kitchen sink. Melmac cups were neatly stored on the yellow contact paper on the shelves behind the glass doors. Sometimes, you'd bug Ma while she was cooking and get to eat a raw hot dog. It was just like rolled baloney from Prosperi's around the corner store.

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Alas, Wildcat Lake Is Now Catfish Pond

One ingredient in the summer camp bug juice

was water from Wildcat Lake,

another was genuine bugs from under genuine

Appalachian Trail rocks, and the last was lots

and lots of sugar to help keep all those little campers

excited about being away from home for two weeks.

My first overnight camping trip was at the scout camp at Wildcat Lake. It was a cold Friday night in January and we lugged our equipment up the trail to the rustic open-air cabins.

Our troop leader and the older boys draped the tents across the front and sides.

Shining our green handled right-angle flashlights into the dark woods we scampered through the cold evening prying frozen logs from the crusty ground.

A wet-boot detail disappeared with the Jerry jugs and returned with the water we would need for the night.

A coffee pot and some large sauce pans were set on the open fire to boil the lake water.

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Summer Peaches and Tomato Gardens

Watering the garden was a chore best completed before sunset.

After sunset, starving squadrons of Jersey mosquitoes

searched ravenously for the warm-blooded.

Sucking on a peach pit is the perfect way to while away a steamy summer afternoon.

Roll it around carefully and use the pointed end of the pit to pick out the strands of peach fuzz and pulp between teeth.

All this while the taste of fresh peach tingles through your cheeks.

One of the first things Dad did when we moved into the big house in Belleville was to chop down the black walnut trees and plant a half-dozen peach trees in their stead.

It wasn't long before the low growing peach trees bore fruit and we filled baskets while we decided what to do with the bounty.

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The fountain of youth under the pipeline

The fountain of youth under the pipeline

Four decades later, I return to the pipeline. The dragon's

tail is less pronounced, and full-grown trees

hide the view of homes on Sycamore.

“Hey, Ant! You got a third eye!” Gary yells but it doesn’t help me see much better.

Fumbling, I pick up my twenty-six-inch Schwinn, but I drop it just as quickly. Then pick it up again. Holding it up, it’s holding me up.

Gary is staring at me. I sense this more than I see it. Can’t see much of anything really. Gary looks like a tree, the bike in my hand, a tangled red bush. The world isn’t spinning but it’s coming in cloudy.  I sense something tremendous has transformed my eight-year-old body.

“That’s what happens when your bike hits a rock on the pipeline,” Gary explains.

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Waiting for Jerry the Ice Cream Man

Hot summer nights on our dead end street 

were full of mosquitoes, fireflies, kids playing Sputnik, 

and an interminable wait for Jerry the ice cream man.

Back in the day, our refrigerator's freezer was the size that fit two ice trays and a pound of chop meat. Then that small cool space froze over and there was never room for ice cream except at your birthday!

Back in the day, our refrigerator's freezer was the size that fit two ice trays and a pound of chop meat. Then that small cool space froze over and there was never room for ice cream except at your birthday!

It was the same way up and down the block on Gless Avenue in Belleville, N.J. Anybody who got rid of their ice box and got an electric refrigerator had about the same amount of freezer space.

Unlike an actual ice box, think: the kitchen on The Honeymooners, where you put in a block of ice and it melted water into a pail underneath, these new-fangled refrigerators used electricity to take heat and make cold.

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Spring: Time to Move the Air Conditioners

Every year here in New Jersey when we change our clocks to save time, there's another chore around our house. About the last week of April when we spring ahead, it's time to break out the window air conditioners from their closet hibernations. 

In October, it's time to rip off the sealing tape and bring in the units without dropping them on an innocent foot or to the pavement below. The two bedroom air conditioners need only cross from the closet to the window. 

It's the monster dining room air conditioner that has been stored in the basement that elicits the most grunts and groans as it travels up a flight of stairs, through the kitchen to rest and catch its breath in front of the window.

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Waiting for Jerry the Ice Cream Man

Back in the day, our refrigerator's freezer was the size that fit two ice trays and a pound of chop meat. Then that small cool space froze over and there was never room for ice cream except at your birthday!

It was the same way up and down the block on Gless Avenue in Belleville, N.J. Anybody who got rid of their ice box and got an electric refrigerator had about the same amount of freezer space.

This is Jersey. It's hot in the summer in New Jersey. We were hot. We sweated and drank tap water from the garden hose to cool off. We ran around in the sun, got sun burn, it peeled, and we went back out in the sun.

In the summer, it was hot. We played in the heat. We kids kept cool by running around outside and making our own breezes. We played hide-and-seek and learned to count to 100 by fives. At our peak on that one dead end block we had up to 28 kids. (We're talking baby boom, here.)

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