Early summer is so quiet, it's a feast for the eyes, not the ears. Flowers bloom and fireflies flicker. Late summer is noisy, if less spectacular a feast to watch. I like it best, because it has such a lovely somnolence. The world of growing and buzzing things rests, enjoying the fruits of spring and early summer's labors before fall requires them to prepare for the next cycle of growth and birth.
The evening performance put me in mind of a passage in a review this week in the New York Times. One of my favorite actresses, Bernadette Peters, is appearing on Broadway in "A Little Night Music." The reviewer was enamored of her rendition of "Send in the Clowns" but not very enthusiastic about the production as a whole. Here is part of his review:
Desirée has just come to realize that the dreams of reuniting with her now-married former lover Fredrik Egerman (Alexander Hanson) were the comforting delusions of a sultry summer night. Alone with Fredrik at last, she drops the role of the worldly seductress and carefree flirt that she assumed in order to play Fredrik’s renewed infatuation against her young lover’s obsessive devotion. The heart she has kept under wraps for too long speaks forth the unhappy truth: The love they shared in their youth and brushed aside so cavalierly cannot be recaptured without painful cost in middle age. Closer than ever before, they are also infinitely farther apart.
For some reason, drowsing on the bus on the way home from work this evening, my thoughts wandered to a long-ago high school and college (very briefly, both times) boyfriend.
When I first noticed him noticing me in high school, I was thunderstruck. I could never get over that he noticed me. In college (we both went to the same school) he showed up twice at a sub shop where I waitressed, the second time deliberately I think because he came without his then-girlfriend. I ignored him and haven't seen him since, and I dreamily wondered in the back of the bus today what would have happened if we had managed to create a relationship.
I think it would not have been great, from my viewpoint, because there was too much immaturity on both sides. But he made my heart pound. And a little night music made me think of him.
1 comment:
The boys and I were just discussing the same thing on our way to swimming lessons the other morning. I tried, maybe too earnestly, to help them see the good side of not having an air conditioner: we get to listen to the changing sounds of the night animals as summer passes. Never occurred to me to attach it to the lovely pairing of words: night music.
One of my fondest memories of growing up on Overbrook is falling asleep to the sounds of the trucks on the highway below, and the hundreds, (thousands?) crickets and frogs, and other creatures that croaked so loudly in the backyard.
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