Summer’s Fireflies

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Late summer is always bittersweet, especially living in Provincetown. As I write this Carnival is in full swing, but I can feel the end of summer in the air. The death of summer has a smell to it long before the crowds drive off the Cape on Labor Day. It’s the itchy aroma of ragweed, making me cough and sneeze, the signal for me as a boy that school was near, and the time for play was over. As children, summers seemed endless, long stretches of lazy, languid weeks between first and second, or fourth and fifth, or eighth and ninth grades. As an adult, I carry with me that perception — that misperception —still, always thinking in May that summer will go on forever, that I will have time for everything I want to do, everything I’ve wanted to accomplish every summer but never seem to get around to doing. This year, Tim and I pledged to finally go to the Monomoy nature preserve. We promised ourselves to go kayaking in Truro. I envisioned, as I always do, plenty of time — weeks, months! — to fall into the lazy summer routines of my childhood, trudging to the beach, staying up late, catching fireflies in a jar.

But summer now has a way of melting like an ice cream cone in the hot sun on a long walk down Commercial Street. Every year I say to friends, “It went by so fast.” Why do I give such a presumption of longevity to June, July and August when I do not imbue any other month with such power? Why do I think I can accomplish so much in the three months of summer when in no other three-month stretch in the course of the year carries as much expectation? Time has a way of slipping away faster every year, and now the summer is over again, and still we haven’t made it to Monomoy or hauled a kayak to the Pamet River. My summer routine isn’t much different than my winter one: pressed by deadlines, my excursions to the beach have been few and far between.

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Yet that’s the story every year, deadlines or no. For within me ticks a clock: as summers die, what else must go? If I capture the moments of the summer like fireflies in a jar, then the moments lost, the moments never lived, are even more precious — butterflies that got away, diamonds lost amidst the sand. In the first version of this essay, written some thirteen years ago, I lamented time lost with my friend Victor, who sat stretched out in his chair at our rental house, body bronzed, reading The New York Times, sipping his ice coffee and smoking his cigarettes. My readers will recognize Victor as Javitz, the mentor and conscience of The Men From the Boys and Where the Boys Are. When I first wrote these words as a younger man, I was melancholy for the plans Victor, Tim and I had nurtured at the start of that summer, some of which, as ever, failed to materialize. Now I am melancholy for Victor. Period.

But even in that first piece I celebrated those moments of summer that resonated for me: the tricks and the trolls, the late-night conversations about love and friendship, the giggly fits wondering which one of us was being cruised (and by whom), the night Victor was whisked off on the back of some guys’ motorcycle, the late afternoon bravado before Tea Dance, the long walk out along the breakwater, the shared confidences outside Spiritus at 2 a.m.

Wonderful memories — but none of it is ever enough, because of that damn clock, always ticking. Once upon a time, the clock seemed to tick only for Victor. Thirteen years ago, I wrote wondering whether this would be his last summer in Provincetown, his last summer healthy in Provincetown, his last summer alive. Well, it turns out he had a few more in him — he died in 1996, at the height of summer, in fact — but strange how that clock kept ticking even after Victor was gone. Only now it ticks for me. For Tim. For all of us, really — and so I cherish every moment that I can snatch from the waning summer.

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Late summer is indeed bittersweet. It is a time of transition, from the fantasy world of summer back to the world of wintered reality. For all I did not do, I still had a joyous summer, as I always have — the friendships, the love, the sex, the laughter. My garden has blossomed beyond its borders — way beyond its borders! — fulfilling a dream Tim and I had years ago when we first envisioned flowers and trees growing in the sand of our yard. But still, as always, I want more. More time, more fun, more life. And I’ll continue to want more, and regret time lost, and vow again, next summer, to have it all.

A version of this essay first appeared in Provincetown Paper, August 26, 1992.

Photographs Timothy D Huber