Summerlings

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For us boys, the summer of 1959 was as cataclysmic as a meteor. Washington’s historic plague, our wild neighborhood party, and my first acquaintance with death—these are the things I remember so vividly from that bright season, along with the accompanying feelings of fear, revelation, and wonder.

I was eight, the time in life when everything is still new, and some things are perceived clearly but others are murky and not understood—that is to say, those things in the realm of adults. What my friends and I knew was a grab bag of information overheard, along with information we made up and told one another and accepted as fact. Not really so different from the grown-up world, I suppose. We existed in a smaller world of our own daunting challenges, peopled with gods and monsters. Sometimes they were the same.

It was a scorchingly hot summer. Maybe the record-high temperatures had something to do with our plague. But Washington summers are always fairly hot; the city is built on a swamp, after all. What were L’Enfant and Banneker thinking? Paris, I suppose. Wide diagonal boulevards, circles, obelisks, bronze and granite heroes—but built on marshy land where cattle once grazed.

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