The height of Summer, the depth of Memory. Go figure.

I often wonder why I don't have any recent, specific memories of Summer's past.

Of course, I have some romantic memories of distant Summers.....back when the days all started cool, and the endless games of baseball started early enough that the dew made the baseball and the tops of your tennies damp; the sounds of the Meadow Brook Music Festival wafting over the early evenings, and you could sit on your front porch as the lights came on and get yourself a free concert; and of course, that bumpy cake my Mother always got me for my Birthday.

But the Summers of my adulthood always seemed to include the theatre.

I could tell you that I could name every single play I've ever done during the thirty years of Summers since I first walked on a Summer Stage.....but I remember, most of all, the people.

I am not, by definition, a joiner.  I don't introduce myself well.  I spend a lot of time in the backs of rooms, hoping that somebody will stick out as somebody who could make heads or tails of my public flailing.  I hide my vulnerability behind sarcasm and wit.  I'd do my job, and that would be enough.  But every now and then, I'd find a person or two who's company I enjoyed immensely, and they would stay with me throughout the decades; either in person, or in my memory.

In 1990, I met a group of people that made me laugh louder and longer than I had in a long time; and that laughter usually was around a table in which a furious game of Spades was going on, often all night.

In 1988, it was a hot summer, a drought that turned the Mississippi to a trickle, but there was another group of people that would light a fire on the shore, bring a couple of guitars and some liquid courage, and we'd sing and laugh and look at the stars.

Several times, I would be blessed with the kind of companionship that keeps the darkness at bay for awhile; and even though I broke my heart upon the rocks a couple of times, and broke one once, I am warmed by the memory of them.

One of my best friends became one of my best friends when he laughed out loud at a reference I made to a Kurt Vonnegut novel.  I held out my hands and said, "See the Cat?  See the Cradle?", and he responded, "Why don't you take a flying f**k at a rolling doughnut?  What don't you take a flying f**k at the mooooon?"

And he actually drew out the word, "mooooon."  Which made us friends for life.

Summers were always filled with that new frontier of people, stages, audiences and scripts; the new experience, the new space....and one more opportunity to make life-long connections.  And even in those long summer runs, I never got bored.  Not once.

I find, as I approach an age that I never expected to get to, that I miss the audiences, and the stage beneath my feet.  There was never a place where I felt more in control, more at home.  But more than that, I miss those specific people; and I long to set eyes upon them again, and hear them laugh and see them smile and sing and listen to the crickets as the sun goes down.

If Heaven is what we make of it, let it be filled with those moments.

Y'know?