Reasons to love summer are many

he Commercial Review
Summer. The temperature hits a certain mark, and the memories start flooding back.
Memories of:
•Going barefoot, all the time.
•Running up and down the cinder-paved alleys in our neighborhood to toughen up the soles of my feet.
•Finding that those soles turned black when I walked on the oiled hardwood floors of Smith’s Department Store on Commerce Street.
•Playing pop-out flies, a baseball type game you could play when you didn’t have enough kids to make a team. A ground ball was worth “25 cents,” a ball caught on the first bounce was worth “50 cents,” and a fly ball was worth a “dollar.” When your total reached $1.50, you took over as the batter and knocked out flies and grounders to the other kids.
•Racing. It seemed incredibly important as a kid to be the fastest. Even if that meant a silly sprint across someone’s backyard or a hell-bent-for-leather bike race with a buddy. (I nearly lost my life at North and Middle streets when I raced through a stop sign in order to win. I think I shortened the life of the driver who stomped on his brakes to stop his pick-up truck before I became its hood ornament.)
•Pine Lake. I’m old enough to have memories of those summers before Portland Pool opened. Its predecessor had been closed by the health authorities. I’ve made the trek back a few times with my kids when they were little, but it mostly lives in memory.
•Roasting apples over trash fires. This was a neighborhood gourmet treat. Pick a few green apples, put one on a sharp stick, then hold it over a burning barrel of trash in some neighborhood alley. Healthy? Not at all. Delicious. You bet.
•Sixty. That’s what we called the game of tag played at dusk on so many summer nights. I have never figured out why it was called 60.
•Who shall put the dot in? When a game of 60 started, it was necessary to figure out who was “it” first. To do that, we’d have one person turn away from the others and lean against a tree or a phone pole. Then another person would draw a circle with his finger on the first person’s back, chanting the horrible, racist, embarrassing phrase, “Round as a moon, dark as a ’coon, who shall put the dot in?” (Some scholar of American slang is going to figure out where this came from.) Then one of the kids would poke the first kid in the middle of the back. The kid who had been facing the tree would then have a chance to guess who had “put the dot in.” If he guessed correctly, the poker was “it.” If he guessed incorrectly, he was “it.” Looking back, it seems like a heck of a lot of ritual to go through to get a game of tag started.
•Stepping in things. One of the hazards of going barefoot was that inevitably — in a neighborhood with a lot of dogs — you stepped in something.
•Trying to find the monkey. One of my best friends when I was growing up — Dan Cox — owned a monkey. The monkey’s name was George. And every year, at some point while Dan was cleaning George’s cage, George took off. While he explored the neighborhood, every kid around was part of the posse charged with getting him back in his cage.
Don’t you love summer?