Nobody announces the last summer of childhood. There is no ceremony, no certificate, no kindly county official standing beside the road with a clipboard to explain that the next turn changes everything. You simply wake up one morning and notice the familiar world has gotten smaller. You assume the world shrank. It takes years to realize you grew.
Summers in Alabama came as a collection of sounds. Lawn mowers started early, before the heat became unreasonable, which in Alabama is about 6:40 a.m. Cicadas argued from the trees. Screen doors slapped shut. Somewhere a radio played a song that seemed written specifically for that afternoon, and probably was, by a man in Los Angeles who had never seen an afternoon like it.
Time moved differently then. A single day could last a week, especially if there was nothing to do. We complained about boredom without realizing what a luxury it was to own hours nobody else had claimed. I would pay good money for one of those boring afternoons now. I have checked. They are not for sale.
The first time I heard a song about leaving home, I was sitting at home, which seemed like an excellent arrangement. The singer could travel the highways, suffer heartbreak, and sleep in strange motels. I could listen from a comfortable chair and still be present when supper was served. It was adventure on the installment plan, with none of the payments.
But something in that voice unsettled me. It was not the promise of adventure. It was the idea that a person could love a place and still need to leave it. That one sat with me a while, like a neighbor who comes over to borrow a cup of sugar and stays through dinner.
I had begun measuring distances. The walk to school was ordinary. The drive across Birmingham felt significant. Beyond Alabama lay cities I knew from maps, album covers, and television. New York had tall buildings. Nashville had musicians. California appeared to have sunshine available by subscription. I wanted to see all of it. I also wanted to be home by dark. I have been trying to reconcile those two wishes ever since, with mixed results and occasional assistance from law enforcement.
That contradiction followed me straight into adolescence. I could spend an afternoon imagining myself onstage before thousands of strangers, then go silent when asked to play something for three relatives in the living room. The crowd in my imagination never interrupted to ask whether I had finished my homework. The relatives always did.
I was learning to disagree. Sometimes I had a reason. Sometimes disagreement just made me feel taller. I wanted to be trusted with choices, though I still hoped somebody would rescue me from their consequences. This, I have since learned, is not a phase. It is a lifestyle, and it comes with a monthly fee.
The adults kept doing the work of being adults. Bills arrived. Meals appeared. Decisions were made about matters I barely understood. I mistook their routines for certainty. I did not know that grown people mostly proceed with about as much information as children, only with better shoes and a checkbook.
My mother could hear worry in my voice before I admitted it to myself. She listened to the world. Other people I admired preferred to push on it until it moved. I saw two ways of meeting life: listening to it and trying to change it. I would spend decades confusing the two, usually listening when I should have acted and acting when I should have kept my mouth shut.
Church remained part of the landscape. I knew the hymns, the familiar passages, the cadence of a prayer approaching its conclusion, which every child learns to detect the way a dog hears a can opener. But belief had started to feel less like an answer handed down and more like a question I would have to answer myself. What did I believe when nobody was listening? It was an uncomfortable question. I preferred questions about amplifiers.
At church I heard there was a time for everything. A time to plant, a time to pluck up what was planted. It sounded lovely until I thought about what uprooting required. Plants do not travel without leaving something in the soil. Neither, it turns out, do people. I have left bits of myself in more soil than I care to list.
One evening I carried a guitar outside and sat where the porch light barely reached. I could not play what I heard in my head. My fingers stumbled. The strings buzzed. The song kept slipping away just as I thought I had it, like a cat that wants to be near you but not held. I tried again.
Across the street, windows glowed in other houses. Families were eating dinner, watching television, disagreeing about ordinary things. I wondered whether everybody behind those curtains was as unsure as I was. I suspect now that they were. I suspect they were also wondering about me, mostly about the noise.
Later, in bed, I watched headlights of passing cars move across the ceiling. Each pair appeared, crept slowly along the plaster, and vanished. I wondered where those people were going and whether anybody was waiting up for them. It is easy to romanticize leaving when somebody else is paying the electric bill. I romanticized it thoroughly.
Still, the longing was real. Music had shown me that strangers could recognize each other through a melody. A singer could describe loneliness in a town he had never visited and make a boy in Alabama feel understood. Maybe the world was not divided into familiar people and outsiders. Maybe we were all just singing different verses of the same song, some of us slightly off key. I was one of the off-key ones. I still am. I have simply learned to sing with more confidence.
Years later, I would leave places badly. I would mistake movement for progress and distance for peace. I would learn that some journeys begin only when a man finally stands still long enough to tell the truth. None of that belonged to the boy watching headlights. He was waiting for a beginning, not an ending.
Down the hall, someone called his name. He answered reluctantly and went to join the family. The record kept spinning after he left. When the song ended, the needle rode the empty groove, making its soft, steady hiss. He assumed there would be plenty of summers left. Growing up, it turns out, happens quietly, while the dishes get washed and the news plays. And then it is gone.
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
Ecclesiastes 3:1 (KJV)
— JC
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