Summer friends
Memoirs
Charles McGrath
When I was a kid, my family wasn’t big on vacation. Money was tight and we were mostly limited to day trips. All five of us were packed into a sweltering station wagon heading to a historically interesting nearby location. We wandered the battlefields of Starbridge Village and Gettysburg and nodded in honor of the replanners and cycloramas. I was secretly pleased that we were not blacksmiths, candlemakers, or soldiers rushing on horseback with almost certain death teeth. After stopping at McDonald’s on my way home, my brother and I were always riding unplanned wiffle balls and bikes, and when it rained, the TV was rerun. Our summer was almost the same as the rest of the year, a little lazy and sweaty. And they haven’t been exposed to any kind of nostalgic glow in my memory.
It wasn’t the case with Charles (Chip) McGrath. His family wasn’t wealthy, but he was fortunate enough to own an unruly vacation home. Perhaps his grandfather won it with a raffle. He remembers with respect and affection. At that time — fascinated, almost — and the spell wasn’t completely worn down. Early in “Summer Friend,” McGrath, a deep and moving memoir of his sun-drenched, described the lake house (his family called it a “camp”) as an adventure. Described as a kind of disappearing childhood Eden, a place of self-transformation. At school, I was a good and teacher’s pet, so I was a little bullied. But at the camp I was popular and was the leader of our little gangster. His parents sold the place when he was a teenager, but not before it left a permanent mark. “It was camping that I learned how to be a summer person.”
McGrath’s memoirs are the story of his quest to recreate those golden youthful summers as an adult. At first, the story is a little bag. There is a refreshing sociological background to democratizing leisure in the United States, followed by a dark comic chapter in family history. “My grandfather was known as the Mac, and my brother and I looked down on him. He was a grumpy, non-humorous old man who appeared in the camp every summer and miserable everyone.” In the late 1960s, when he saw McGrath meet his wife in New Haven, he took a young family to a short summer villa in an unnamed town in southeastern Massachusetts.
Many of the later chapters are activity-based and have titles such as “Swimming,” “Golf,” and “Boat Confusion.” The enjoyment of the readers of these sections will probably depend on their tastes. I’m not a golfer, but I loved the aging 9-hole course snapshots he likes to play. Bill Bryson: “The opening hall, a tiny par 3, is surrounded by a blue metal warehouse behind the green. The last time I visited there was a man who was welding in front and taking a shower of sparks. 5 The 6th, 6th, and 7th fairways were lined with what looked like old aircraft engines. There was a huge crater in the middle of the 6th fairway, and a diesel pump was working to suck out water. On the other hand, in the boat chapter, my eyes were a little glazed, especially where the “pintle” had to be dropped into the “gajon”. This is clearly a very delicate and important operation.
