TOO DARN HOT

By ROY BLOUNT JR.

What's the rush to summer? Can't we linger over spring? How come in spring we have spring cleaning and Tax Day, whereas in summer we have festivals? Why don't we have a new crop of spring movies?

Because in summer, we need amelioration. Spring is fine in itself. Spring can afford Tax Day. A summer movie in spring would be like a glob of marshmallow on tiramisu.

In spring, the fancy turns lightly. In summer, when bug bites reach their apogee and people judge you by the color of your skin (and yet you are well advised, for health reasons, to daub yourself with sun block to the power of 24), the fancy turns glutinous. A summer day that is lovely is basically a spring day. An echt summer day is icky. You are willing to sit through Meatballs 4.

Granted, there is no bouncier generalization than "the girls in their summer dresses." But doesn't it apply primarily to late-spring-early-summer? How about when those dresses start to wilt and those girls start deciding it's too hot to smooch?

And doesn't gossamer garb become problematic when people are lurching back and forth between blast furnace and air conditioning? Here's summer in a nutshell: you're dragging yourself along over torrid pavement and you're hit by a blast of AC exhaust. Then you get on the supposed good side of that churning machine and the fine film of sweat that covers your entire person freezes, so it's as if you've been dipped in a schlocky margarita too heavy on the salt. There is little difference between summer weather and aversion therapy.

It's not just spring (and fall) that summer suffers in comparison with. Take winter. I don't care how cold it is in winter, you can generally get warm. And cozy. Then when you bundle up and venture out, you go from toasty to bracing. In summer you go from icy to broasted.

The sun doesn't stay down long enough in summer. Hey, I like daylight. But if the evening is still young at 11:30 p.m. and glare is going to commence in six hours, when do you get any sleep? The following afternoon, that's when; and I don't know about you, but I cannot recall ever awaking at 4 p.m. feeling chipper.

The worst thing about summer, though, is that something causes us to regard it, from a distance, as a golden opportunity. This summer, we tell ourselves in February, we're going to have a big block of time--to relax and enjoy the kids, to take that vacation we've always dreamed of, to get that work project finished. Somehow it never occurs to us, until summer actually arrives, that not one of these three prospects is in any way compatible with either of the others.

"Summer afternoon--summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language," Henry James once remarked to Edith Wharton. Well, the words, sure. The words "murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves" (Keats) are felicitous, but how about the flies? And let us remember that Henry James lived in England, where what is so rare as a day of sun? I'll bet James didn't rhapsodize over summer afternoons back in St. Louis. I have researched decades of public statements made by Enos ("Country") Slaughter, the old Southern-reared, hell-for-leather St. Louis Cardinal, and I have not found a single reference to the salubriousness of home-field summer afternoons.

Molly Ivins once said, with respect to the elder George Bush, that no one is a true Texan who uses "summer" as a verb. If summer drives you away from where you live, your roots are indeed suspect. If it doesn't, though, and you live in Texas or any other state south of Maine, the only verb you use for three months of the year is buried in the contraction "innit," as in "Whee-ooo, innit hot?"

It's true that I grew up in Georgia, moved north one summer 30 years ago, and haven't lived anywhere south of Brooklyn since. A few years ago I did spend July in Atlanta, where I found to my ethnic chagrin that at temperatures over 90[degrees] I could no longer digest hush puppies. You might accuse me of having some kind of compensatory agenda, like an ex-communist swung drastically to the right.

Who knows? With all this talk of summer, I am not thinking clearly. But neither will you. Summer thickens everyone's intelligence. Look up summer in the Oxford English Dictionary, and you will find this citation (whose spelling I have modernized): "I had rather shiver and shake for cold in the middle of summer, than burn in the middle of winter."

Who wrote that? Sir Thomas More. A knight, a saint, a humanist, a wit, a martyr and a man, famously, for all seasons. And yet a man so besotted by the idea of summer, evidently, that he would foist that season's worst weather off onto winter.

Or maybe he's saying he'd rather put up with a cold snap in June than be burned, literally, at the stake in December. In which case, I have a retort for him that is snappy enough for summer: Duh.