(First published June 24, 2018 in  The Times and  The  News Star.)

I am writing this on the night before the first official day of summer and you are reading this most likely on the first official weekend of summer.

That’s a beautiful thing. Not necessarily that we both can read, although that’s quite the huge break, but that we can read…during the summertime.

Eddie Cochran co-wrote and recorded “Summertime Blues” a way long time ago and Alan Jackson covered it. Bur for reals? Summertime Blues? What blues?

Every now and then as a grownup in late June, with worries about the electricity bill and your child’s braces and that dictator boss of yours, something happens — the smell of salt water or the sight of a child eating an orange sherbet push-up or the imagined taste of watermelon — and you are magically transported back to the time when there was no school and no shoes and, outside of gnats and your bicycle chain coming off now and then, no problems.

All of a sudden, again, it was summertime.

Real, childhood, barefoot, sweat-soaked, play-all-day summertime.

I love summer.

The inflatable pool.

The lemonade stand.

Tiny people running around aimlessly smelling of dirt and sweat and peanut butter and jelly.

Baseball. Little Leaguers.

The Frito Pie.

A shade tree.

The fascination with the Snow Cone has escaped me but I respect that for many, Snow Cones are the “s” in summertime.

A met a little girl, maybe 7 or 8, with her mom recently and said to her, “Happy summertime.” She went from bashful to a big smile just like that.

Summertime will do that for you.

I am approaching fossildom (fossilhood?; fossilness?) and so can remember summers of 50 years ago. This one memory on a day of having absolutely nothing to do involves me on my back in the grass across the street from my house and in front of the church, in the shade of a pine, my head on the ribs of my collie, Sport, and us just looking at the sky. He was probably looking more at the grass or chewing on a stick, but still…

Summer is a beautiful thing. Almost makes me wish I still fished.

Where did you go on vacation with your parents? Might be one of those one-day deals to Six Flags or even to the beach where your family pretended, for a few days, to be rich. This involved sunburn and sand in places you didn’t know you had and arcade games and some sort of sandwich on a paper plate at lunchtime.

We were never a Mountain Cabin people but I know lots who are. And really, the destination wasn’t so important. Wherever your parents threw you into the back of the Impala and took you, the main thing was that you didn’t have to get back for school Monday. Because there was no school Monday.

Because it was the greatest of all the seasons, summertime.

For sure, the heat is not as much of a friend as it used to be. It’s an age thing. There is more of a “wilting” situation than there used to be. We of age wilt faster.

But still, I’d rather be hot outside than cold. Snow and a jacket? Neg. All the people who complain about the heat will be wishing for it when the rare ice storm hits in January and they are wondering why their electricity — and heat — won’t come on.

But that’s nothing to worry about now. Not today, because it’s summertime, and the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high…

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(DESIGNATED NOTE: This ran originally in the spring of 2010 in The Times and The News-Star during a time of serious volcano activity in Iceland that cut short my vacation. (Just a joke, but not the volcano part.) The picture here is of a volcano playing nice; the one in Iceland wasn’t. I did a quick check and found that volcanoes, when they erupt, are pretty much undefeated…)

“Now my girl quickly said to me
Man, you’d better watch your feet
That lava comes out soft and hot
You better lova me now or lova me not…”

— “Volcano,” Jimmy Buffett

Like many of you, I had to cancel much of my European air travel for the past 10 days or so. That’s how it is in the unpredictable volcano game.

You really don’t spend a lot of time thinking about volcanoes. Weathermen students spend less than a day on them in meteorology school. Volcanoes are close to the bottom of the ladder on the Natural Disaster Scale, like beets and the worthless radish hug the bottom rung on the food ladder.

Granted, what I know about volcanoes is ant hill-sized, including only the following:

* Jimmy Buffett, “Sulpher smoke up in the sky, pretty soon we learn to fly!”;

* The history of Pompeii, buried in ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the 1^st Century. Historians suggest the residents of the prosperous city didn’t know Mount Vesuvius was a volcano waiting to happen, small consolation to guys like Pliny the Elder and the other 20,000 or so who perished during that single day. Naples-area realtors who’d sold “Beautiful Hillside Lots!” had some serious explaining to do; and,

* For art class in fourth grade I did a chalk drawing of Mt. Fuji. It was put on display in the lobby of my hometown’s First National Bank, which was about the size of the cloakroom in our fourth-grade classroom. I drew Fuji in it’s non-erupting state, mainly because we were out of red chalk.

So I’m in unchartered water here.

But I do know something about newspapers, and while the recent eruption of the Iceland Volcano has grounded air travelers and upped the dry cleaning bills from Aberdeen to Dusseldorf, it has also laid waste to more than one headline writer and television anchor.

The problem with this volcano is its name: Eyjafjallajokull. (Pronounced “eyjafjallajokull.”) Whatever!

It’s Icelandic for “island-mountain glacier,” something we don’t see a lot of in Louisiana. Looks like a 4-year-old found the typewriter keyboard.

Whatever happened to naming things after simple things, like “Driskill Mountain” or “Caddo Lake”?

“Henrik’s Hill” or “Petur’s Volcano” would have done the trick. You can’t swing a cold cat in Iceland without hitting a Henrik or a Petur.

But that’s another story. The problem here is that Icelandic geographers and city planners fumbled. Names like Eyjafjallajokull make it hard for publicity folk. Besides being impossible to say, words like “Eyjafjallajokull” have a snow ball’s chance, even in Iceland, of getting into a headline. WAY too long.

This is why you’ll often see headlines like “Big Ben in trouble,” but rarely “Roethlisberger in trouble.”

“Tiger” and “Dr. J” and “The Babe” and “Mt. Fuji” and “St. Helens,” those are headline writers’ dreams. Compact. Tell-all. Easy to spell. For hurricanes, three syllables – “Katrina” – is all that hurricane namers are allowed. True.

As tragedies and global problems often do, this most recent volcanic eruption has reminded me how bright our American military is. Because no one could say the volcano’s name without sounding too Icelandic, too drunk, or too smart for their own good, the military shortened it to “E-15.” That’s because it starts with an E and has 15 letters following.

Roger that.

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