Summer

I rode my bike tonight. I went out at 8:10, thinking I'd just ride around the block as the evening breeze began to cool everything down, be gone maybe ten or fifteen minutes. But I stayed out until full dark, until the streetlights came on, and I smiled to think of the summer nights when I was kid, when we stayed out as long as we could, reluctant to return to the stuffy house and bedtime and trying to sleep in the stifling air with mosquitoes buzzing everywhere.

If we were on her good side, Mom would let us eat a giant bowl of ice cream before we went to bed.

This night, as I pedaled around the park, I recalled those nights long ago of riding my bike or skating or playing hide and seek with the neighbor kids and my brother and sister.

It was a night much like this one when my brother found Lucky. We were sitting on the front porch, doing not much of anything and loving the activity, and suddenly Kevin said, "Hey. What's that in the street?" He went to investigate, my sister and I tagging along behind. Curled in a ball in the middle of our street was a young black cat. He picked her up, cuddled her, then marched into the house to place her squarely in our mother's lap. Mom was sitting on the couch talking on the phone, and I still remember giggling as he handed her the cat and we fled outside. Remember, back then our phones were anchored to the wall. He called back to her something about keeping her safe, and when we went back outside he told us just to wait. We did.

A long time later Mom ended her conversation and we heard her call "Kevin" through the screen door, stretching out the syllables in a tone that was both ominous and amused. We shuffled warily back inside. The little cat was now curled in Mom's lap, purring away as our mother stroked her fur and glared at her second-born son.

"We don't need a cat," she told him.

"I know," he said, "but she's lucky."

And that became her name. She was the first black cat in our family. And she was extraordinarily patient with my brother, who at times told our dog to chase her just for the fun of it, and once he tried to make the tip of her tail white by dipping it in bleach. (He succeeded in reducing the black luster to a dull orange. Don't get the wrong idea; my brother wasn't a bad kid, just bored. In those days, we had to find things to do. The things we found weren't always good things.)

This was the memory that flooded back to me tonight as I pedaled my bike up and down the streets of my little community. I have always loved going out on a summer night to ride my bike. It is a calming, contemplative venture these days, but it does still immediately make me feel like a kid again. Hard to believe I'll be 64 in two weeks.