A couple of weeks before his 63rd birthday, the man laid down for an afternoon nap. The man loved afternoon naps nearly as much as he loved the first taste of his freshly brewed coffee as he woke from his nap.

Right before he drifted off to sleep in his big California King bed, he heard his father call his name. It was odd because his father has been passed away many years ago and they were never particularly close. But he did hear his name called by his dad.

Maybe it was because he had just come in from outside where the steamy summer heat reminded him of summers as a child. The kind of summer day where the air has weight to it. Normally, air is weightless. But in hard summer heat, the air is just, simply put, heavy.

As he walked the yard on this day, checking to see if the baby chickens had water, stopping along the way to admire the plate-sized pink and white hibiscus flowers in full bloom that his wife tends to and assessing what needed to be mowed again and when, the man recalled summers as a kid for a minute.

He hated mowing as a boy and he never did it right enough, but still, he mowed when he had to. Today mowing is a stress relief for him; some odd satisfaction that he never expected to happen in his life. Because back then as a boy,  it was some sort of medieval torture that had been dreamed up to torment the very soul of a teenage boy. Pausing for a bit by the pool he remembered the long days of hot summers out of school, baseball games with his buddies up the street; Keith, Neal and Jeff. One of those is now gone on and it just never seemed possible as young boys playing baseball in the lot beside their house, that one day that would happen to any of us four.

But life has a way of happening, very slowly and quickly at the same time.

Summer days at our house was all about putting up beans and whatever they had raised out of the garden. One of his claims to fame was the infamous butterbean saga.

His mom had left him a large Big Star brown paper bag full of butterbeans to shell while she went to work. When she came back she asked why there weren’t many butterbeans. The boy told his stern mother that ‘there were a lot of bad ones in there’. Once she shuffled thru the bag of butterbean shells, she made him go thru the bag and get the good ones back out and reshell them. In his defense, he had developed a good system for this time-saving procedure that got him in trouble: shell one butterbean and throw two away.

Unfortunately, his mother found no glory in his system.

He remembers his white three-legged dog named Charlie. And a small red/white fat and fluffy dog named Tootsie who flew many missions with him in his Nasa space capsule tent in his backyard. With an old quilt, his hard plastic Snoopy with his space helmet bubble and mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread, the Earth was successfully orbited many times. Sometimes 3 times in one day.

And every single mission, he brought them all safely back to a very soft landing behind his house on Cook Street.

So maybe sometime many years ago, when he was across the street riding his ten-speed bike with the orange flag flapping, maybe his mom had been busy putting up fresh red tomatoes in cans on the stove and she told his dad to ‘go call Mark, supper is ready.’.

Not sure of a lot of things in life, but I know when I hear my name called.

I also know that as I sit and type this out, a bright and beautiful red bird is steadily feeding and watching me through the sunroom window.

That’s the best that I can tell about it.