Month: July 2019

My Last Summer In Camden

I’m going to start this essay by admitting that the title isn’t entirely accurate.  The summer of 1995 was not the last summer I spent in Camden, New York.  It was the summer just before I left for college, and I would return the following three summers before finally moving to Boston after graduation in the summer of 1999. 

And yet the title is as true as it is inaccurate.  In retrospect, 1995 was the last summer that I was a true resident of Camden before I rode off into my wide-open future beyond the hills and the horizon.  The next four years, as far as I was concerned, I was a citizen of St. Lawrence University, only coming back to Camden over Summer and Winter Break to visit the family, recover from the semester, and make some money before I returned to my real home.      

That was a special summer, like none other before or since.  Usually, an opening like that announces the beginning of a summer love story, but that love story – the love story that would define my life for the next thirteen years – didn’t begin until I actually got to college.  That summer was a time for a different kind of romance.    

Continue reading “My Last Summer In Camden”

Two Summers

I’ve been thinking a lot lately.  Thinking about Summer.  Two particular summers, in fact.  Two special summers, long ago.  Sometimes they seem long ago, anyway.  Sometimes they seem like yesterday.     

I visit these summers from time to time anyway.  Sometimes I think that’s what summer is about, once you get to a certain age and summer mostly just means that it’s the air conditioner that’s on in the office instead of the heater – remembering summers when it meant more than that.  But right now they’re haunting me hard.  That’s what happens when you visit home, I guess.  You walk the country roads, you listen to Strawberry Wine and Chattahoochee and Like A Rock, and you think about the summers when you were young and this was your home.

So what to do?  How to put those ghosts to rest?  I’m a writer, so I write.  I tell the stories of those summers.  Except there is no story, exactly.  No grand romance or quest.  The only adventure in these stories is being young.  These stories will be more poetry than prose, trying to capture a feeling instead of a series of events.

Stay tuned. 

(And be on the lookout for other, older Stories Of Me.  I’ll be importing those from my other blog soon.)