If on a Summer's Eve a Writer

(From a story posted on my personal blog a year ago: July 4, 2023.)

From a child, I would, on rare occasions, look at a thing and sense from it a timeless, ineffable outreach.?

“Look at me. Notice me. Remember me. You’ll wish you had," it seemed to be saying.

Whenever an object craved my attention like that—inanimate, not, foreign, familiar—it was as though, for that occasion only, something glowed in my bone, flashed in my wit, or vibrated in my gut without any visual adornment. Early on in my life, I initially paid no mind to these mysterious encounters, even dismissing out of hand the strangely talkative whatever-it-was as some random, why-are-my-eyes-resting-a-beat-too-long-here bugaboo. But something would invariably come of it, leaving me wishing I hadn’t been so cavalier. Guilt-mongered by my better angels—once I imagined a murmur over my shoulder of something like, “Told you”—I vowed to pay closer attention if it ever happened again. But after each rebuke, either audible or logical, the repeating pattern—Look, Listen, Forget, Regret—would seep from my mind in a matter of minutes.?

Living in N?mes, France, one fall and winter nearly fifty years ago, I roomed upstairs from a French brasserie on the Rue de Corneille, a Roman stone’s throw from?La Maison Carrée?(the square house). With no lift to carry my Peugeot bicycle and me to my third-floor apartment, I parked the bike every night in the?rez-de-chaussée?and detached its portable pump before trudging up two tall flights of circular limestone. On my meager stipend, the bike was hardly replaceable, but I had learned early on and the hard way that the pump was more likely to go walkabout no matter where I locked the bike. I kept its replacement upstairs for the duration.

One morning, as I was exiting my apartment, the replacement pump caught my eye.?

“Bicycle pump,” I heard it say, or felt it cry out, or noticed my eye lingering on its white, cylindrical, attractive nuisance a moment too long.?

But as I had learned to do over the years, I paid the inanimate outreach no heed and continued down the windy stairs to the foyer. After clipping on my pant clamps, fetching my bike, and lifting it over the threshold to the stone walkway, I felt the clunk of tire on stone that riders immediately know as the signature sensation of a flat. Retracing my steps to grab my repair kit, the bike pump, and I had a brief moment alone.?

“You know I’m right about these things, but you never bother to learn my language. You should really consider changing your attitude.”

Prior to 9/11, Kari and I fell into the habit each American Independence Day of taking our kids to our usual haunt near the outdoor Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, to watch from there the world-famous fireworks show above the Washington Monument. After the attack on the Pentagon and Twin Towers, we fell into a second habit of trekking somewhere closer to home, like Poolesville or Germantown, Maryland, to celebrate the Fourth of July.?

Seated on the Metro as I write this sentence, for the first time in nearly a quarter century, the Knell family, at the request of its oldest son Timothy—who last night brought his wife and girls to Maryland from California—is once again schlepping into the city for tonight’s festivities. If memory serves, there will be music, picnics, personal fireworks smuggled in from neighboring Virginia, and a mosh pit of generally happy and occasionally unruly people who have come to the capital area from virtually every corner of the world.?

As I think on our earlier pilgrimages—driving past hundreds of boats at anchor on the Potomac, scores of pedestrians crowding bridges and overpasses, dozens of office workers in (or atop) their places of work, all awaiting the 16-minute public display of explosion set off at the evening’s climax—I bump up again to a string of words I once heard in mind’s ear that when taken together, bookend two life-altering events: for myself and if I dare to go there, a little boy named Mark.

“Bicycle.”

“Headlamp!”

“If on a summer’s eve a writer…”

It is 1995. Kari, the kids, and I are walking the mile or two from wherever we parked that afternoon to our favorite pyrotechnics viewing spot, a copse of woods and grass near the reflecting pool that ran from the Lincoln to the Washingon, ground zero so to speak for the fireworks show to follow several hours later. We are joined in our parade by three families from our Maryland neighborhood with whom we often celebrated the season. At this particular moment, I am walking between Bill Egan and Robert Parsons, dear friends of ours since moving from Boston seven years earlier; their two boys, Mark and Daniel, practically arm in arm a dozen yards ahead. They can’t have been older than four and five, but they know the way or are keeping an eye on their older sisters farther on. We dads are likely talking grills—Bill’s thing; birds—Robert’s thing; or maybe Wimbledon—we all liked tennis.?

As we quicken our pace to keep the boys in sight—”Slow down!”—I begin to wonder, not for the first time, what my “thing” actually was. I enjoyed tennis, sure; the previous summer, I stood for hours in “the queue” to watch Pete Sampras at Wimbledon. But by that stage of my life’s energy and enthusiasm for sport, tennis was no longer a regular for me. A couple of times a year, maybe, including at the beach with Bill and Robert every spring break, but, sadly, not anymore.?

“You used to write,” I hear myself answer. “What happened to that ambition?” And not for the last time do I hear the would-be-writer in me cut off its lapsed impostor with, “Don’t even pretend to go there.”?

But as it’s the Fourth of July, and I have no other preoccupation keeping me from my thoughts and alternatively applied dreams—and since I have no talent for grilling nor taste for birding—I tune out Bill and Robert for a moment to follow what at first I mistake for my own voice.

“If on a summer’s eve a writer were walking behind two young boys, who look as though they haven’t a care in the world, what might he scribble of his physical impressions of them as they pass through this very moment?”

Humoring what I take for mere Creativity up to her tricks, I begin ticking off a mental inventory of the clothes on the backs of Mark and Daniel when an urgent tone impinges on my musings as if emanating from the shirts and shorts themselves.?

“See me. Remember me. You must pay attention to what you are looking at.”

(To read the remaining five minutes of this story, click here.)