August 16th, 2026

        
      The middle of August was always a transitional period in the neighborhoods of my youth.
      This was the weekend our baseball gloves and bats stopped going with us to the park where we picked up ballgames all summer. School was about to start, and for my classmates and me, that meant getting our Catholic school uniforms together and discovering that last year's pants had somehow shrunk two inches.
     It was also the week we started bringing a football to the park. That patch of grass that had been our baseball diamond since May suddenly became a gridiron.
    The “Duke” football we got for Christmas had spent most of the last eight months waiting patiently in the closet for its chance to turn a bunch of neighborhood boys into future Hall of Famers.
    Thinking about those August transitions made me realize something else this morning.
        We really weren't kids for very long.
  My estimate puts the actual window somewhere between our sixth and thirteenth birthdays. Before six, we were still little kids, depending on our parents for just about everything. Somewhere around thirteen, the machinery of growing up begins to turn. The opposite sex became more interesting and our parents became more embarrassing.
   Organized sports replaced neighborhood games. We began worrying about clothes, popularity and everything else that eventually chases away the beautiful ignorance of childhood.
      When we look back on our youth, childhood seemed like the longest chapter of our lives and when we were living it, and it was. Looking back after a dozen chapters have been written, our golden era of bubblegum and cartoons lasted about seven years.
     Seven years of sleepovers and building forts. Seven years of getting eighteen kids together for a baseball game without sending a single text message. Seven years of playing smear the queer and ding-dong ditch. Seven years of worshipping the guys pictured on our baseball cards and believing there was a slim chance that we would grow up to become one of them.
       My seven years ran roughly from 1972 through 1979.
  When we played neighborhood football, I went from pretending to be Dick Butkus to pretending to be Earl Campbell.
   At the baseball field down the block, I went from hitting like Dick Allen and throwing like Wilbur Wood to batting like Willie Stargell and pitching like Vida Blue.
      The names changed because the world around me was changing.
   I went from a coaster-brake bicycle to a ten-speed. I went from one-scoop ice cream cones to Good Humor bars. I went from wondering what a boner was to occasionally waking up with a sticky belly.
       That is a hell of a lot of ground to cover in seven years, but the biggest change wasn't bicycles, baseball players or puberty.
   I went from holding my mom's hand to trying to get as far away from her as possible. I went from not being able to see over the dashboard of my dad's Cadillac to being sent outside on cold winter mornings to start it for him. I was his automatic car starter before there were automatic car starters.
   I was also his remote control. We had an old Zenith television in the family room, and my father would occasionally yell from downstairs,
         "Hey Moose, turn to channel nine!"
   I would be upstairs in my bedroom. He would be sitting ten feet from the damn television, and I would come downstairs and change the channel.
            That was childhood.
    You did not question why the man sitting ten feet from the television couldn't get up and turn the knob himself. You just did it.
   Maybe that is why those seven years seem so enormous in our memories. At thirteen years old, seven years was more than half the life we had lived. No shit it felt like forever.
    At sixty, seven years doesn't feel like forever. Seven years feels like Tuesday two weeks ago, and maybe that is why these middle days of August still stir something in me.
   There was a rhythm to childhood that we didn't understand while we were living it. Memorial Day meant summer was beginning. June meant baseball. July meant swimming pools, bicycles, lightning bugs and staying outside until somebody's ma started yelling names from the front porch.
        Then came August.
  The evenings started getting a little shorter. School supplies appeared in stores. Catholic school uniforms came out of closets. Baseball season wasn't technically over, but somehow we knew that it was time.
   The mitt that had rarely left our hand all summer was rubbed with a little oil, folded around a baseball and shoved under the mattress. The football came out of the closet. The baseball diamond at the park became Soldier Field and another summer disappeared.
   We didn't know there weren't many summers like that left to live. That is the part that gets me now.
    A kid thinks childhood is permanent. There is always going to be another Saturday morning cartoon, another pickup game, another bike ride, another sleepover and another August when the baseball glove gets put away and the football comes out. Another August with mom and dad.
   Until one year, without anybody noticing it, you don't put the glove under the mattress. You just stop playing and doing kid stuff.
         Here we are in the middle of another August. Time to put the mitt under the mattress and grab the pigskin out of the closet.
    While you are running errands and doing chores this morning, think about your own seven years.
     Think about the kids who filled your neighborhood, the games you played, the athletes you pretended to be, the bicycle you rode and the voice from the house telling you it was time to come home.
    We thought we were kids forever. Turns out, it was only about seven years.
  

    What are your memories from your golden era of bubblegum and cartoons?

       Gusto, Chalkheads, sprinkled with astonishment and sunshine.