I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. SUMMER’S ALMOST OVER.
Summer has a funnel shape. It seems real wide at first, and deep. Slow. Like it will last forever. You just float on top of it.
But all the time it’s getting smaller and smaller. And before you know it the summer days are getting sucked down faster and faster. You’re helpless. You can’t stop it. You’re like a bug in a toilet that was just flushed.
One sure sign that summer is coming to an end is that I start liking the kids on the corner again. There’s these little kids that always play on the corner in the warm weather, and I’m sort of their hero. Like, they always stop me when I’m going by on my bike and give me paper and ask me to make them paper airplanes, which I’m an expert at. I also have to settle their little arguments and all.
Early in the summer I don’t mind it much. Then it gets to be a drag. But then, I kind of start liking them all over again. I guess because I know that as long as they’re out there playing on the corner, summer isn’t over yet.
Baseball: you can feel it dying. Every morning we meet at the field in the park: me, Richie, Calvin Lemaine, Peter Kim, and Dugan. All day we play. We can feel September closing in. We hit a little harder, run a little faster, stay a little longer. We try to squeeze out of the summer every base hit left in it. So far I have two hundred and forty-seven homeruns this year. (I keep track.) I’m shooting for last year’s record of two hundred and ninety-five.
I get home and I kind of don’t want to wash. Because I know the day is coming when I’ll have to wait nine months to get this dirty again. When I oil my glove and put it away in the shoe box—that’s when baseball will be officially over.
I ride my bike more now, when I’m not playing. I go farther and farther from home.
I guess my biggest regret is that another summer is gone and I still didn’t learn to spit between my teeth like Dugan.