A Prelude to Summer, 1999

by Kevin T. McNulty, Teacher

For the past three summers I have left my family to pursue a master’s degree in far off Vermont. This summer I planned to go even further; to Oxford England where I would study all the great dead English authors in the land where they lived and wrote. Unfortunately--or so I thought-- my funding did not come through for such an extravagance, and opting to skip Vermont this summer, I stayed at home for the first time in both my young marriage and the young lives of my two kids. In the past I have found that the consequence of not staying home is missing special events. For instance, the first year I went away was the summer my son took his first steps. I missed ‘em. I’ve seen subsequent steps on video, but I was not there for the real deal. With my daughter I was luckier (since I made it home with little more than a month to spare before she transformed from quadruped to biped). So this summer I was looking forward to not missing a thing.

Just before classes let out last year, I remember telling my high school students about my two-year-old daughter’s and my backyard forays with the kickball. I would dribble (with my feet) that bouncy yellow ball in our modest grassy space, and my daughter would chase me around giggling and trying to steal it back from me. With only sandals and socks on, I tiptoed around the yard, almost floating, eluding my cheery daughter. I would dribble from one end of the yard to the next, and at the west end I would kick the ball into the center of a staunch white oak tree, and the ball would sail back past me so that all I had to do was turn around to resume my little display of dexterity and coordination. One time, however, I kicked the ball into the base of that oak tree with a confident degree of force, and instead of bouncing off the tree and rolling back behind me, that little yellow infidel flew straight from the venerable gray bark and slammed full-force into my face, snapping my head back in whiplash fashion. I looked around to see if any of my neighbors could bear witness, and then I moved away from the ball and took my daughter in for the night with a completely irrational sense of resentment.

The next night, after school, my daughter wished to play with the ball again. I had since forgiven the ball, and I took up our little game again, and it proved as fun and exhilarating as it had the day before. I dribbled, and she chased. I floated, and she cackled. Things went marvelously for as long as my two year old’s span of attention lasted. After a long day at work--as are the nature of school days in May and June--I found the activity rousing. So did she, but soon she tired of the game and moved toward the rusty old swing-set that bent over in the corner of the yard. We had inherited this swing-set from the people who sold us the house., and though my wife and I didn’t like it much, the kids still had a good time on it. My daughter took a seat on a belt swing that I had recently repaired. She started pumping her legs as she had observed us teaching her older brother to do, and I walked over to her with the yellow rubber orb in hand. As I walked to her I took the ball with both hands and raised it up with the intention of BONKing her lightly on the head in a playful manner. My aim was merely to play, to jest, to share a laugh by BONKing her softly. She would like that. She is a two year old, and two year olds recognize the humor in such events. Unfortunately, this two year old, unexperienced in the ways of swings and gravity, thought I was handing her the ball, and so when I brought it over to her, she took her hands off the chains of the swing to catch the ball that appeared to be being handed to her. Unable to hold her balance, she immediately fell back and hit her head on that hard-pack trail of dirt that has result from years of skidding feet. Oh she cried. Tears streamed down her face and skipped off her dress. The yellow ball had struck again.

I took her up into my arms and walked with her into the house consoling her. She cried miserable tears of pain, and I fretted over my own stupidity. I began to tell the story to my wife over the din of my daughter’s shrieks, and I only needed to get to the part, "I held the ball out to...," and my wife knew what had happened. What an idiot she thought, almost outloud. Neither my daughter nor I could offer an argument to the contrary, and the little one never fully recovered before she went to bed early that night with tear-stained cheeks and, no doubt, a headache.

That was how I started this summer. I finished it by tearing down that old rusty-toothed swing- set and erecting the strongest wooden set I could build. I hand-picked all the straightest lumber. I used screws where it called for nails. I used a t-square and a level. I shortchanged no act of reinforcement called for in the directions. I tested each of its accessories with my own one hundred and fifty eight pounds, and as my last act of the summer, I hid that yellow ball. My children are enjoying the swing-set immensely, and I am enjoying watching them from a seat on the patio.

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