Summer’s denouement

I first shared this story on 14 September 2008, and have shared it several other times since. I’m sharing it again as I’m feeling some childhood nostalgia this week. During my 1970s kidhood when schools started after Labor Day as God intended, my mid-August birthday always meant summer was beginning to end. By then, the afternoon sun was at its fiercest, and the annual August dry spell had begun to brown everything that had been green. The street lights switched on earlier, sending us inside for quiet evenings with our families and our TVs. Summertime children on Lancaster Drive. August 1976. The dozens of children all up and down Rabbit Hill, as our parents nicknamed our prolific neighborhood, always sensed these changes. We squeezed in as much play as we could before time ran out. One fellow down the street, thinking he was Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms, always organized and directed an end-of-summer show, an extravaganza that nobody watched because everybody was in it. I would try…