EDITOR’S CORNER
Friday is the first day of summer, the season with which Texas is identified by most of our fellow Americans.
And, of course, they are right to do so. Our summers are something special, to use a word that doesn’t begin to describe the last week of August in Wichita Falls.
It’s disconcerting to discover much of the rest of the world has a different view of summer than Texans.
Shakespeare, for instance, famously began one of his sonnets: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Later in the poem he notes “and summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”
I’m beginning to suspect Old Will wasn’t from around here.
Wasn’t great at naming his poems either. This famous one is entitled “Number 18.” Right between No. 17 and No. 19.
The satirist Richard Armour once began a parody of that poem: Shall I compare thee to a summer day? Sweaty and fly infested.
Not terribly romantic.
Shakespeare was, of course, from England. My wife and I are aficionados of British television shows. In the one we are currently watching, about two years has gone by in the storyline and its characters have never changed out of heavy coats, mufflers, stocking caps and footwear which looks like might be more at home on a ski slope than a city street. In college I had a professor who told us about getting to spend a summer in England as a student.
About this time of year the temperature was in the low 60s every day and there was an unrelenting foggy mist. At breakfast one morning he asked the family with which he was staying: “Say, when do y’all have summer over here?”
The lady of the house twisted her face into a remembering pose and replied: “Let’s see. I think it was on a Tuesday last year.” Do you have northern relatives who see a 104-degree high in Texas and try to console us by saying “oh well, that’s dry heat isn’t it, doesn’t feel so bad.”
Dry heat? I’ve got one word for you: Houston.
I wonder if many northerners’ views of Texas have been shaped by movies such as “Smokey and the Bandit II.” In that one a cross-country truck chase crosses the Arkansas-Texas state line at Texarkana and immediately is in the desert, towering sand dunes and all.
I get a few smug emails every summer about how nice it is up north while we are sweltering down here. Okay, I’m willing to grant that. But you’re going to have to give me equal time in the winter.
My family has frequently taken Christmas holiday time trips to Missouri.
Weatherwise, I start longing to cross the Red River heading southward after about a couple of hours in Big Mo.
Once, a relative-in-law showed me his rural place and we came to a pond—which I, of course called a “tank”—that was completely frozen over.
We were walking together until we got to the edge and he calmly strolled out on the frozen surface. I stopped dead in my tracks expecting to be witness to a water rescue in very short order.
Puzzled, he turned back: “Doesn’t it do this where you live?” he asked.
Uh, no!
I’ll take Texas, summer included, Apologies to Mr. Shakespeare:
The Bard once penned an ode to summer,
That seems an odd and curious bummer.
My street has melted down to clay,
My house’s paint has faded to grey.
Our grass has died; the trees are fried,
I don’t really dare to go outside.
I went to the pool to flee the heat
Before I could plunge, I burned my feet.
Now I’m not ancient, not much of a geezer,
So I’m still able to jump in the freezer.
But I’m a Texan and I love to remember
It’s gonna cool down about November.
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