July 11: the holiday only I celebrate

An essay about a Hershey bar — about summer and anticipation, about countdowns and chlorine

Lately: I finished season three of “The Bear.” Like most people on the world wide web, I didn’t really like it. Most of the new episodes felt like vehicles for real-life chefs to make cameos and for Carmie to take us through psychedelic flashbacks. If I saw one more news headline, flashed across the screen so fast I couldn’t really read it, I was going to scream. The only episodes I actually enjoyed were the capsule episodes with Tina and Natalie. … Now that I’m done playing TV critic, can I whine about how hot it is? It’s so hot. It’s too hot to cook. Too hot to eat normally. … On a significantly more serious note, I’ve been reading a lot about Alice Munro and the abuse her daughter suffered — the abuse Munro seems to have known about and ignored. This piece from the New York Times, in which writers recontextualize her literary legacy, is very much worth reading, as is this one from the Cut. “The other kind of recognition I felt learning this news was of fragments from Alice’s writing,” the author of the Cut story, Michelle Dean, writes. “All the stories, every last one, are about secrets the people in them keep because they are constrained by personality or, more often, by their ‘quiet’ social order from expressing any kind of inner life. Some of those fragments sound so different now.”

too-hot-to-cook dinner; some flowers in Mystic, CT

Okay, hello! That was a lot to pack into the intro, and I still have a bit more throat-clearing to do. Bear with me: This newsletter is different from what I usually write, in that I’m not even pretending to try to focus on food. (Though there is food in what I wrote, it turns out.)

I’ve mentioned here and there that I’m working on a novel. It’s set, in the beginning, in a fictionalized version of my childhood summers, and the central characters are loosely (so, so very loosely) based on people I knew back then. The elements I’m drawing from real life are more ephemeral: intense friendship, the weight of secrets, the easy oblivion of childhood.

Part of the process, for me at least, involves writing things that aren’t strictly part of the story — stuff that triggers memories and makes me feel creative. And that’s what I’ve written here. It’s not fiction, but rather an essay I jotted down to try to evoke how I felt about those summers — especially one particular day that stands out only to me, only because I imbued it with more significance than it may have deserved.

The year I was 8, my parents joined a country club. My dad talked a lot about how the golf course had been designed by some well regarded designer of golf courses. My mom talked occasionally about how far this club was from our house: 15 minutes without traffic, which in St. Louis was an almost unthinkable distance. And, once the summer started, my brother and I talked almost ceaselessly — but only to each other — about the unlimited supply of snack bar food. All we had to do was provide our member number, 1622, and someone would slide us a hot pretzel, a smoothie, a candy bar. 

We never mentioned this to our parents. In our still-coalescing brains, we knew they hadn’t quite caught on to this free-for-all.

After the first couple of months, we were found out. Snickers bars, cans of Coke, Drumsticks, chicken fingers — the bill was an artery clogged with summertime disregard. I don’t remember getting in trouble. I do know we were told, in no uncertain terms, that we would get in trouble if this ever happened again.

We were still allowed our treats, but we had to ask permission, and we didn’t get them every day. And so I started to appreciate them more, to savor them. Every time I unwrapped a milk chocolate Hershey bar, I broke it into its 12 demarcated rectangles, and then I broke those rectangles in half into squares. I spread the bites out on the wrapper in front of me on the glass-topped table and savored each one, letting it melt in my mouth, letting the sugar coat my teeth in a hot electric tang. I always noted when I was halfway finished, and I ate the last 12 squares even slower, already sad at how soon they’d be gone.

That’s the kind of kid I was: I planned and I parsed. I mourned things before they ended. I was always looking forward. Two hours until the swim meet, two weeks until the Fourth of July, two months until school. Life imitated Hershey bar. 

Even so, I was a happy kid. I loved school. I loved my friends, my family, my hamster. But when I was 8, when my skin was sunburned and my hair was bleached the brightest blonde and chlorine-streaked with green, I learned I loved one thing even more than everything else. Summer. Paradise was a run-down pool in a middle-class Midwestern suburb.

I made friends, so many friends, and they were different from the kids I went to school with. They were tougher and tanner, and their parents cared just a hair less about their test scores and whether they could play the piano. They ran on the crumbling concrete pool deck, even when a lifeguard shouted for them to slow down. They skinned their knees and fished drowned frogs out of the baby pool. 

The days were never-ending. The sun was barely over the horizon when swim practice started, and when it ended, we yanked off our caps and goggles and jumped right back into the water, racing and diving and wrestling until our fingers turned to prunes, then to raisins. We never reapplied enough sunblock or waited more than a minute after eating before cannon-balling back into the cold, chemical water. Sometimes we hit tennis balls for a while, and sometimes we took a break to play gin rummy in the snack bar, an ancient building that looked like it was one thunderstorm away from collapsing. Some nights, we stayed at the pool so late that the sprinklers on the golf course sputtered on, and we’d run around on the fairway until a grown-up noticed and hollered for us to come back right this very minute.

But then, inevitably, the water got warmer. The pool was prehistoric, with no heater, no cooler, barely any middle ground between ice bath and bathtub. The temperature mimicked the air above it, and by July, when the humidity became unbearable and unshakeable and never-ending, the pool was a swamp. It was peak summer.

And in my brain, that meant only one thing: Summer was well on its way to ending.

I’ve always been a pool rat

One year, when I was 11 or 12, I did the math. I counted the days between the end of school in late May and the looming start in late August, and I calculated the midpoint. I broke down my summer like I’d broken down those rectangles of chocolate, and I landed on July 11. It was the halfway point, one week exactly after the Fourth. I could still smell the rotten-egg whiff of fireworks and feel the slick rind of the greased watermelon we’d fought over in the deep end — and now summer was barreling downhill too fast for me to fathom.

That year, I cried when I woke up on July 12. But then, instead of mourning, I rallied. I resolved to squeeze every drop of sweat and melted snocone I could out of the next six weeks, and I think I did. The memories have faded into sped-up montages: dee-jay parties after swim meets and fast rides in golf carts with older boys, chicken fingers in chafing dishes and the fear in the pit of my pale stomach the first time I put on a bikini.

I never calculated the midpoint of another summer. But I never forgot July 11. It became a milestone, a holiday. Some years, it would sneak up on me, and others it would loom. It reminded me that fall was coming — fall, with my real life and my real friends, when I was quiet and bookish and never broke the rules. It was a quiet warning that summer is never as infinite as it seems. 

Now, all these July 11ths later, the season has softer edges. A sun-drenched Saturday in April is summer. A warm Tuesday in mid-October is, too. But there is still, always, July 11, and it never passes unnoticed. I drink a second glass of cold wine on a patio. I walk to get ice cream after the sun goes down. I remember those perfect, scrappy summers, with kids I haven’t seen in decades, at a pool that was long ago filled in with dirt. I imagine the smell of chlorine and wish I were sunburned. I remember the taste of melted milk chocolate, licked off a salty, sweaty finger. Twelve pieces left.