The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, August 9th. It is the fourth of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On August, and On Everything After
“That is the most relaxed I’ve ever seen anyone look.”
I was surprised by the comment. I’m not usually much good at relaxing. But for whatever reason—the beer from lunch, the empty to-do list from then ‘til morning, the calm of lake and tree and sky seeping into me—I was relaxed. I was lying on the knobby backyard of a friend’s lakehouse in northern Wisconsin, and I was relaxed.
I’d reached my arms out above me, not straight, but straight enough that I could feel their weight, and now and then I’d let my forearms swing down, alternating, bouncing lazily back and forth. The ground wasn’t muddy, but it wasn’t rock hard either, and I wasn’t in the sun but I could see the pure blue of the sky. It was a cool August day. And I was waiting.
It’s difficult to relax. There’s a lot to be done. I read an article once, a few years ago, saying the generation a decade below mine would be messed up by not having experienced boredom. The argument went that being forced to sit without stimulus is good for the brain. It makes sense. I don’t know that boredom’s the word, but it’s nice to be forced to wait now and then. To sit without entertainment, without productivity, without plans to be made and responsibilities to tetris together into the week ahead, pushing as little off the table as one can.
There’s a lake where I grew up. It’s a small-town lake, not a rural lake like those ones up in Wisconsin. It’s only a mile and a half long, and half a mile wide, and the southeast corner of it rides along a stretch of public park where there’s a beach and a bandshell and a baseball field, straddling an ambling road which connects the western part of town to the city’s main thoroughfare. There are boats in the summer, some using the natural racetrack shape to pull skiers around the deep, bobbing center, where the pontoons hang out and the fireworks raft gets blocked off by the police boat on the Fourth of July.
Along the south shore of the lake, extending west from the park, are four private beaches. Their private status isn’t strenuously enforced, except for now and then by dissatisfied parents trying to take the eminent frustration which defines their lives out on teenagers from around town. It used to be, though. There used to be gates in the neighborhood, blocking off what I suppose could be called a parkway, along which rich folks from Chicago had summer homes in the 1920’s and 30’s. I guess they wanted it to feel exclusive. Wealth, and race, and all the rest. My history teacher back in my junior year of high school brought in documents showing us the neighborhood had formally been a sundown town, a close-enough-to-touch lesson that even idyllic places—or maybe it should be ‘especially,’ not ‘even’—have carried heavy swords of brutality.
Each gate had a number, and the numbers have stayed long after the gates were gone. I grew up on the corner of Richmond Lane, with a sign in the yard matching nineteen or twenty others except that it read “Gate 19” instead of the respective gate number for the respective other sign. The four private beaches bear the number of the gate nearest, so every few blocks as you walk along South Shore Drive you pass Beach 3, and then Beach 7, and then Beach 13, and finally Beach 21.
Beach 21 was the closest to our house—fifty or a hundred meters closer than Beach 13—and it had the biggest real beach, refilled every summer on an ecstatic day when instead of playing running bases, Will and I would dig through the mound of sand and try to build a tunnel. There’s a volleyball court between the parking strip and the beach, and there’s a raft, and to the left of the dock if you’re looking outwards there’s a good wading area, whereas the right side’s pretty mucky. Out in the northeast corner of the buoyed-off rectangle there’s a raft, and kids would try to tip it, and would rarely actually tip it, but if you told Mom about kids trying to tip the raft she’d remind you of how some friend of a grandparent had gotten trapped under a raft and drowned somewhere in Iowa in 1937.
We stopped going to Beach 21 so often when baseball picked up, first with Michael, then with the whole family. We were older, too, so when we did go, instead of a day of play with the cousins, it was more often us with a few friends, sitting on the raft or playing volleyball or egging on some middle schooler who’d watched a lot of Jackass as he rode his bike off the end of the dock and had to drain the hollow frame when he’d dragged it back up onto the shore. But we’d also go alone sometimes. Especially after baseball had ended for the summer, and we’d gotten back from vacation. Will preferred to take a kayak with him, if I remember right. I think he liked to paddle the lake in the middle of the night, maybe going the whole way around the lake’s circumference. My balance was bad, like it is now, and I might’ve gotten less of the necessity of activity genetically, so I favored an innertube, blown up with the unwieldy, noisy air compressor Dad kept under his workbench in the garage. It was an easy two-block walk with the tube resting on your shoulders and head, and then you’d plop it down on top of the water, execute a controlled chest-first fall into it, paddle out to the edge of the buoys, roll over, and let the waves carry you in.
The exercise was disorienting—the world tipped upside down, water lapping against your head, the shouts of little kids either up on the sand or over on the raft or down the water a quarter-mile at Beach 13. In ways, it separated you from the world. In others, it made you keenly aware of the world. Eventually, the tube ran aground, and you either paddled back out, got up and went home, or you lay there…waiting.
I didn’t do it a lot, but I remember it most viscerally a few times the summer before sophomore year, when we’d gotten back from a week in Quebec and Will was making the rounds before going off to college and I was waiting for school to start, in what was, looking back on it, the last childhood summer with much waiting to be done. The days were getting shorter, and the air was starting to cool, but the sun was there on your skin, so it was warm, and kids from around town were getting the go-ahead to do more things on their own, so I ran into some of the nicer ones a time or two and did the “how was your summer” and “what classes are you taking” and “let’s hang out some this fall” (we did not hang out that fall). I wasn’t comfortable around many folks outside of those actually in my classes, but I remember feeling more confident those days, and my best guess is that 1) those kids were, again, some of the nicer ones and 2) I was feeling relaxed, and it was visible, and when you’re relaxed it’s all just that much easier. I don’t remember the conversations. But I remember the sun starting to sink and redden up the lake, and the oak and hickory leaves silhouetted like the cover of an Easter sunrise service program, and standing there talking to kids I’d known for years and feeling older and stronger and more comfortable. And I suppose we all were.
It’s been a long time since I’ve laid on my back and looked at the sky. I did it for a while my senior year on days I pitched—either in the foul territory down the left field line during batting practice, or during ninth hour study hall out on a bench in that weird little courtyard where the ducks nested. It’s harder down here—the sun’s hotter, and snakes are allegedly a thing, and the old neighborhood was crawling with roaches. But I’d like to do it more, at least now and then.
It’s a tricky business when there’s so much to do, and when I try, I often turn relaxing into just another task on the list, either boxed out by work or boxing out work or crammed in alongside the other things that keep people alive. But it’s something to aspire to, I guess—getting life, or myself, to a point where I can place things in their place in my mind and lie on my back and look at the sky. Maybe I’ll do it today. We’re going to the beach, and while Texas beaches don’t have the best reputation, they say this one’s clean, and there’s water and sand even if there isn’t a raft a bunch of ten-year-olds are trying to flip.
I suppose it’s really my choice—whether to lie on my back and look at the sky, and how to do that so it doesn’t turn into something I cross off a list. Maybe, in this season of life—when work’s ubiquitous, and marriage is making two into one, and children aren’t more than a few summers off—it isn’t about setting aside time as much as grabbing it when it’s there. And maybe, perhaps, I don’t get to wait for the world anymore. Maybe I need to figure out how to wait for myself.
Next week’s essay: On Pat Hughes and Kindness
