The Upside Of Summer Rain Depends On View
June 27, 2021 at 10:00 p.m.
The Upside Of Summer Rain Depends On View
By Chip Davenport-
I had different views of summer rain depending on the stage of my life and a particular activity I was involved in within that stage of life.
We have been, since Friday morning, and we shall be the rest of this weekend, getting lots of summer rain. Heaven knows we need it, but we certainly don’t want it to pound away at crops and homegrown vegetable gardens.
When I was a small child, until the summer after fourth grade, I didn’t like to be outside much. I read books, encyclopedias, newspapers most of the days I was home on summer break. I usually didn’t play outside with friends until after supper.
My family, like most families in the early 1970s, had a patriarch who dictated the time and cadence of dinner. We were ready to eat at 5:30 p.m., a little after my father arose from slumber, or before he was getting ready to get a few more hours of sleep after working on never-ending lists of things.
A 5:30 p.m. supper time meant I had lots of daylight until sunset. If it rained all day, but cleared up by suppertime, that was just fine with me.
I spent my evenings walking around the neighborhood talking to the elderly residents, playing with a few kids my age, or swimming after the kids who would otherwise take turns dunking me in the water were already home for the day.
I spent a lot more time outdoors once adolescence set in, and my interest in sports exponentially increased. The frequency of unwanted lake dunking decreased almost to nothing as I caught up in size and strength to the other neighborhood boys. Frankly and unfortunately for some of those boys who were only at middle school age, more than a handful of them were already getting stoned on a regular basis; too tired and apathetic to mess with me anymore.
My favorite activities were sandlot baseball, sandlot football, and asphalt basketball. The first two, though, were verboten during rainy days because most of our parents did not want us coming in covered with mud.
However, the latter, basketball on asphalt, was not hampered by rain. The basketballs we used were of varying qualities of rubber with one thing in common: they weren’t ruined by rain. All I needed was a pair of tennis shoes with good traction. The summer rain was nature’s coolant, and according to my maternal grandmother, more of a character builder than a nurturer who never minced words, I wasn’t sweet enough to melt.
Bring on the summer rain, as far as I was concerned!
I also liked summer rain during the pre-schoolyear practices for junior high and high school football. The July and August heat was mitigated by those raindrops, and I had a helmet and pads on anyway. The only thing getting annoyingly wet were my shoes and socks. As far as mud was concerned, unlike sandlot football in the neighborhood, our muddiness did not get us in any trouble during football practice.
I started playing men’s slow-pitch softball the summer before my junior year in high school, though, and this is when I would curse the rain because of the postgame social activities (win or lose mind you). I was used as a wild-card runner rarely seeing action in the field. This was the primary reason a carpet salesman in my neighborhood who managed the team, who was also an athletic and academic mentor to me, reached out because I was fast, and I knew situational baserunning quite well.
I learned some of the funniest jokes I had ever heard among salesmen, pastors, and office dwellers who, in return, all got a kick out of the Saturday Night Live bits I could pull with the characters’ voices dead on. I also impersonated village neighbors they knew.
The carpet salesman also asked me to join his friend’s team in Cleveland’s Jewish Community Center (JCC) league for two summers of Sunday mornings for the same two reasons: baserunning and schtick!
Imagine all the first names and surnames on your typical JCC lineup card, running up and down the card until the WASP-iest name in North America, Chip Davenport, jumps out at you! Now and then, I heard the official scorebook keeper exclaim, “Chip Davenport? Are kidding?”
The seasons following my first year of slow pitch softball afforded much more playing time in the field, and plate appearances. It had been a few years since I had picked up a bat and glove among some very futile summers at an early age.
Slow pitch softball was the only activity I recall making me curse the rain.
There is another reason, on the other hand, I did not curse the summer rain.
The most interesting observations I made of the seasonal occupants in the village where I was reared was how they spent their time during the rainy days. The seasonal occupants lived the idyllic suburban and city middle- and upper-middle-class lives we mostly learned about on television, or from visiting our friends’ houses among other towns comprising our school district.
Their parents read the same newspapers my parents read. They ate the same sandwiches my family ate. They listened to the same Cleveland radio stations I enjoyed. They watched the same TV shows my family watched, except Soul Train. This was very evident. My sisters and I loved Soul Train. I also realized, through their interactions when I was invited to play board games, our values were almost entirely similar, and there were lots of memory-making summer days in each of our homes.
I had different views of summer rain depending on the stage of my life and a particular activity I was involved in within that stage of life.
We have been, since Friday morning, and we shall be the rest of this weekend, getting lots of summer rain. Heaven knows we need it, but we certainly don’t want it to pound away at crops and homegrown vegetable gardens.
When I was a small child, until the summer after fourth grade, I didn’t like to be outside much. I read books, encyclopedias, newspapers most of the days I was home on summer break. I usually didn’t play outside with friends until after supper.
My family, like most families in the early 1970s, had a patriarch who dictated the time and cadence of dinner. We were ready to eat at 5:30 p.m., a little after my father arose from slumber, or before he was getting ready to get a few more hours of sleep after working on never-ending lists of things.
A 5:30 p.m. supper time meant I had lots of daylight until sunset. If it rained all day, but cleared up by suppertime, that was just fine with me.
I spent my evenings walking around the neighborhood talking to the elderly residents, playing with a few kids my age, or swimming after the kids who would otherwise take turns dunking me in the water were already home for the day.
I spent a lot more time outdoors once adolescence set in, and my interest in sports exponentially increased. The frequency of unwanted lake dunking decreased almost to nothing as I caught up in size and strength to the other neighborhood boys. Frankly and unfortunately for some of those boys who were only at middle school age, more than a handful of them were already getting stoned on a regular basis; too tired and apathetic to mess with me anymore.
My favorite activities were sandlot baseball, sandlot football, and asphalt basketball. The first two, though, were verboten during rainy days because most of our parents did not want us coming in covered with mud.
However, the latter, basketball on asphalt, was not hampered by rain. The basketballs we used were of varying qualities of rubber with one thing in common: they weren’t ruined by rain. All I needed was a pair of tennis shoes with good traction. The summer rain was nature’s coolant, and according to my maternal grandmother, more of a character builder than a nurturer who never minced words, I wasn’t sweet enough to melt.
Bring on the summer rain, as far as I was concerned!
I also liked summer rain during the pre-schoolyear practices for junior high and high school football. The July and August heat was mitigated by those raindrops, and I had a helmet and pads on anyway. The only thing getting annoyingly wet were my shoes and socks. As far as mud was concerned, unlike sandlot football in the neighborhood, our muddiness did not get us in any trouble during football practice.
I started playing men’s slow-pitch softball the summer before my junior year in high school, though, and this is when I would curse the rain because of the postgame social activities (win or lose mind you). I was used as a wild-card runner rarely seeing action in the field. This was the primary reason a carpet salesman in my neighborhood who managed the team, who was also an athletic and academic mentor to me, reached out because I was fast, and I knew situational baserunning quite well.
I learned some of the funniest jokes I had ever heard among salesmen, pastors, and office dwellers who, in return, all got a kick out of the Saturday Night Live bits I could pull with the characters’ voices dead on. I also impersonated village neighbors they knew.
The carpet salesman also asked me to join his friend’s team in Cleveland’s Jewish Community Center (JCC) league for two summers of Sunday mornings for the same two reasons: baserunning and schtick!
Imagine all the first names and surnames on your typical JCC lineup card, running up and down the card until the WASP-iest name in North America, Chip Davenport, jumps out at you! Now and then, I heard the official scorebook keeper exclaim, “Chip Davenport? Are kidding?”
The seasons following my first year of slow pitch softball afforded much more playing time in the field, and plate appearances. It had been a few years since I had picked up a bat and glove among some very futile summers at an early age.
Slow pitch softball was the only activity I recall making me curse the rain.
There is another reason, on the other hand, I did not curse the summer rain.
The most interesting observations I made of the seasonal occupants in the village where I was reared was how they spent their time during the rainy days. The seasonal occupants lived the idyllic suburban and city middle- and upper-middle-class lives we mostly learned about on television, or from visiting our friends’ houses among other towns comprising our school district.
Their parents read the same newspapers my parents read. They ate the same sandwiches my family ate. They listened to the same Cleveland radio stations I enjoyed. They watched the same TV shows my family watched, except Soul Train. This was very evident. My sisters and I loved Soul Train. I also realized, through their interactions when I was invited to play board games, our values were almost entirely similar, and there were lots of memory-making summer days in each of our homes.
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