High Summer *

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(Summer, the remote past)

I rode my bicycle the same route everyday feeling that I was safer that way.   So familiar had the streets become that I knew every crack in every road and street.   And the houses, and the trees and everything else within view of seven-year-old boy on a bike, I knew them all.

 Back then, Staten Island still had a feel of the rural about it, a sense of timeless age, of creaking wooden objects of ancient trees and the rhythm and continuity of life.  Here and there fields lay open and seemingly unchanged, probably, since the time of the local Indians, through the the time of first Dutch settlers, and beyond.    This rendered it a feeling of great age and antiquity, that here was a place that remained unchanged since anyone could remember or knew.  I lacked the knowledge of history to think in these terms but nevertheless I felt it.   Strongly.   But that was not all nor was it the most powerful sensation I received while riding my bike in the midsummer countryside.  

That was of summer itself.  

 In spite of the houses, the proximity to a major metropolitan area, and businesses here and there, or a large shopping center up on Hylan Boulevard just a mile away, there was a strange and wonderful silence to those midsummer afternoons.   You all know it, I'm not telling you anything new.   But that I was aware of it so intensely as a small boy strikes me now, so many years later, and speaks of something within me, within my deepest soul, or subconsciousness.   It was there when I was born, I'm sure if it.   I am unable to label it—it is a kind of awareness to my surroundings, no—more of a “sensitivity” that allowed me to spend hours pondering the otherwise most insignificant objects or scenes or nature.   There was a power outside and inside of me in certain situations that was overwhelming and over which I had little control.    A midsummer day, in the countryside, under a clear blue sky and soaked in the suns blazing light, was one of the most powerful.

What was it I wrote?   The silence of midsummer?  Not at all, really.   Again, at that age I did not have the words but I knew to think that there were sounds and sounds upon sounds, and interruption of sounds all around and yet, at a certain time of day, when the sun was strongest, it all seemed silent.  And in that silence I thought I found something within me, in fact, the more I contemplated my environment, the sun on the trees, the cracks in the road, the sound of wind in the tall reeds, the more I was discovering what was deep inside myself.   Maybe, it was what was inside me that created the things I noticed or at least gave them their power.   That within me lay the entirety of all I observed, that it was a reflection of some inner reality.  .  . 

I did not think it then but now I know I was experiencing a kind of joy.

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A single dragonfly floated in the hot air around us.  My older cousin, Anthony, and I watched it in happy silence as it landed on a reed that swayed gently in the still and tranquilizing breezes.    

We were standing high up on a large rock just at the edge of a vast swampy area that formed just before the beach.  We shaded our eyes as we looked out onto the distance, past the swamp, to the shore, then further out to the ocean and to the horizon beyond, and even beyond -- to the infinite.  

The sky was wide and blue above us, and cloudless.   Again, a kind of lazy silence hovered in the heat over all.   I looked and tried to observe and absorb it all.   I wanted to name this special moment.   What was it?  What was it that all these things, the heat, the dragonflies the silence, breezes off the shore, the great distance...what was it, that they, when combined together, formed?  I broke the silence to ask my cousin, who did not alter his searching pose or even move a muscle.

We were, I think, in what seemed like a mild hypnotic trance induced by the soft buzzing of bee and the darting dragonflies, the swaying of the tall reeds and the motion of the restless shore.  And the heat, the sun's blazing, omnipresent, heat.   

We stood, motionless and silent for quite a while in the unbroken and eternal stillness. . .such stillness. . . on and on. . . the perpetual sweet summer silence . . we must have lost sense of time and place, all things melting  together into one eternal moment. . . (would that I could have truly made that moment eternal).

"What is this?” I asked him as he, too, tried to take it all in. “What do you call this?” thinking that, altogether "this" must have a name.    

"High summer,” he said, never breaking his stare. 

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*Copyright 2010 (jc)