What do you think of when you think of summer vacation? It might be the fine smell of sunscreen, or the perfectly greasy and way-too-big cheesesteaks down the shore. It might be a boozy, sloppy sunset bar in Montauk or Fire Island. It might be the seagulls that wake you up in the morning in Ocean City, or the green-headed bugs that attack you when you’re not looking on the beach. It might be the spare, plain, puritan lighthouse at Watch Hill, and the dark wood in the town’s one cozy restaurant at night, its light the only light for miles. It might be the late afternoons, when everyone around you picks up their beach chairs and heads back over the dunes, but you stay out because the warm wind is whipping over you and the light is too good to miss. Or, it might be that moment when you’re behind the wheel, ready to roll out on the highway, and a good song comes on the radio or on your IPod, and you start to sing along—and then you get on the highway and run smack into a massive traffic jam. You stop singing; you turn the sound down; the song’s rhythm and forward motion seem to mock you now. You tell yourself to be patient. You’ll get there.
Wherever you happen to live, you might think of something similar. All of these images come to my mind at this time of year, but another, more distant memory has returned more recently. It comes from when I was 13 or 14, when I was more obsessed with tennis than I ever would be again—it still wasn’t too late, at least in my mind, to believe that I might become a pro. That dream didn’t last for much longer; I think it officially died when Boris Becker, one year older than me, won Wimbledon around the same time that I was trying to crack into the Top 10 in the Middle States 16s.
My one recollection of a family vacation from that summer is of me in lying down in the very back—the “way back”—of our Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon absorbed in a tennis novel called World Class. It’s a fictional version of tennis’s pioneering pro tours, written by Jane and Burt Boyar, who spent time with Laver and Gonzalez and Drysdale and Buchholz and Lamar Hunt and company in the 60s and 70s and wrote their highly romanticized account of their valiant exile from, and ultimate acceptance by, the official amateur version of the sport. I loved that book when I read it, and finding it again in the Tennis magazine library I can see why. On the first page, the book’s hero, aspiring American tennis player Christopher Hill, is jogging:
“He veers from the water to the softer dry sand that shifts beneath his feet, forcing the muscles of his legs to strain harder. Approaching his starting point he returns to the water’s edge, breaks into a wide-open spring, and vaults the jetty, facing the sky. 'I know it, gulls,' he thinks toward the seagulls around him, 'I’m going to be the best tennis player in the world.'"
What 13-year-old aspirant wouldn’t be hooked by that? Though I do begin to wonder about my teenage taste when I flip further into this tale of ritzy, jetset, sporting romance and begin to encounter lines such as this:
“Predictably, the lunch was superb.”
Or this about a major event in a female character’s life: “When Katherine was 17, her parents left early one more morning to go yachting. In the evening a policeman arrived at the apartment to tell her that there had been an explosion and her mother and father were dead.”
Death by yacht explosion: Isn’t that always the way with parents?
Or this, which I can’t quite picture my 13-year-old self reading: “Palazzo-pajamed Mrs. Frederick Webb Philipson III posed languidly at the door of the famous Philipson mansion, surveying Christopher. ‘I’m soooo happy to meet you, you beautiful child.’ Her eyes traversed the length of his body.”
Still, looking at the book again, it makes me think that our earliest experiences or passions never really go away. Is it a coincidence that nearly 30 years after I read this book, 30 years after an early tennis obsession ended, that I would write one of my own, about the next wave of professional tennis players that followed the ones the Boyars chronicle?
Anyway, the point of this post is to say that I’ll be on vacation from this column next week, for the first time this year. What will I be reading this time? Since this seems to be my summer of Dylan, I thought I would try his memoirs from a few years ago. I’ll leave you with one story about the man that likely doesn’t appear in his book, but which I’ve heard elsewhere.
Dylan and guitarist Robbie Robertson were in a hotel room during their tour of England in 1966. The two of them, three sheets to the wind, were playing guitar and tossing ideas back and forth while a friend listened. Dylan was at his creative peak at that point, and the observer said that despite their virtual incapacitation, the two were cranking out a slew of incredible new songs, riffs, fragments, vocals. He thought he was hearing the next great Bob Dylan album taking shape right in front of him.
The next day, the man saw Dylan.
“So when are you guys going to record those songs?” he asked.
“Huh? What songs?” Dylan asked back.