Summer Evenings

This evening I put my little guy to bed.  I lay beside his bed and waited for him to drift off. As I did so I was amazed at all the distractions that fill the ears of a young boy, tired, but reluctantly putting another summer day behind him. The whole experience was totally familiar and surprisingly fresh in my recollection just 50 short years after my being in his unhappy position.

Lying there in a bedroom still filled with the light of a summer evening is hard enough. Your eyes remind you that you do not belong here, you belong out there. You belong out there where your ears hear those kids passing by on bikes, voices singing out as their chains tap against the chain-guard with each revolution of the pedals.  Yes, you really can hear that. You belong out there where that dog is barking.  It's not the sound of alarm but rather the happy yap of a mutt at play. And, yes, you really can hear the difference.

And in the house Mom is on the phone. And then Mom is talking to sister. And they're not saying goodnight. And the dinner is done and the dishes put away but someone is still having a bowl of something because you can hear the spoon tap against the glass sides of a bowl. Oh, right. Mom was waiting to have her strawberry shortcake.

So many things are difficult and seem unfair when you're 4 years old. I can tell him this, however: Hard as it may be to find rest and slumber, the memory of all these sounds of a summer evening will someday return and reimburse him for any suffering incurred by having to go to bed before the day was done. These sounds are among the happiest of childhood memories.