a revision from Jean McAvoy from our last session

I wish others would post too!

Summer Jean Valla McAvoy 6/26/10

Summer is here. Even now, as a responsible adult, yoked to a job, I can still feel a hint of the freedom and excitement I felt when school was over and all kinds of summer pleasures lay ahead. And they were many: a trip to Playland in Rye to celebrate that we’d all passed to the next grade; neighborhood hunts for black caps or thimbleberries, which we shared out exactly, sometimes even splitting the little berries in two, which gave us purple fingers and a sense of justice served; later raids on Nonna’s raspberry patch, when the thimbleberries were gone by; the Bassi family reunion, full of cousins and torta and bocce and wine and the men singing old Italian songs in solid harmony (some songs they would translate for me and for others…they’d just smile and say little girls didn’t need to know those songs); trips to Saxon Woods, where you’d get a locker key on a stretchy loop to attach to your bathing suit strap before heading out to the pool to pretend you were a Weeki Watchee mermaid until your lips turned blue and your mother made you get out; catching fireflies in the night (one time we used a beer bottle to hold them and watched fascinated as they staggered around drunk when we released them); early morning trips to Jones Beach to beat the traffic, when we’d arrive to a parking lot full of gulls and leave in the heat of the day, weaving our way over the hot sand and pavement through throngs of people and cars).

But one of the most exciting things we did each summer was quite simple and always unexpected. Suddenly, on a particularly hot, sticky night, my mother would announce
“We’re having waffles and ice cream for dinner tonight.”
And we did. She would mix up some batter, heat up her waffle iron and cook them up. The first batch always stuck and then the iron was good to go. The last batch was always a bit skimpy and didn’t fill out the form. But they were all delicious. We’d go outside to eat them with ice cream on top. And that was dinner. Even though there were many hot, sticky nights it would happen once a summer and you never knew when that would be, so it always came as a surprise. I’d feel a bit giddy, like the world had tilted on its axis, and a bit reckless, like the supper police might come and arrest us.

Let me put this in context. In my world, Nonna Paulina ruled the kitchen, and her meals anchored our family with substance and regularity. She would start to cook in early afternoon and dinner would be on the kitchen table at 6 o’clock, without fail. Northern Italian peasant food, with some American standbys mixed in. Slow food. It was wonderful, truly wonderful, and a touchstone of my life, but that’s another story.

Somehow, those times we broke the rules stand out and mean the wonderful freedom of summer to me. When my mother pulled out her waffle iron, you felt like anything might happen.