2003

I don’t know that I’ll ever forget the summer of 2003. Though it was many moons ago, each time I recall it, the memory of it feels as close to me as the downy soft hairs on my sun-tanned forearms. Involuntarily, the corners of my lips turn upward, tugged into a beguiled smile. Then, in a fleeting second, maybe a nanosecond, a shudder jolts through me, reminding me of how the summer abruptly halted. How could I forget a season of so many firsts, and lasts? 

By the time the school year ended, I’d already obtained my work permit, and started applying for jobs. I could just envision the wardrobe I wanted for the following school year, and though Mom usually had me covered, I wanted extra. I had a passion for Hot Topic accessories and Converse sneakers in all colors. I figured since I was far too old for summer camp, I may as well get paid for my time. My 15th birthday was on the horizon, and I felt like the world was my oyster. But, as I said before, this would be a summer of firsts.

My summer plans crashed when I received my last report card of sophomore year in the mail. I had struggled this year especially, trying to transition from the curriculum of an inner city middle school that didn’t challenge me to a high school where all of the courses were honors. Having always been the top of my class when it came to all things language, english and reading, math had always thrown me for a loop. I had often joked with my eccentric band of friends that I’d been fuzzy in my math skills since being confronted with fractions. This year, math would prove itself to be my undoing. All of my grades were solid B’s, with an A in English, which was to be expected, but the D’s in Geometry and Chemistry resulted in my very first (and last) stint in summer school. Bummer.

Trading in my work permit for more school supplies, I found myself trudging in 80 degree weather to a local high school that I’d often rode past, but had never gone into. Douglass Senior High School was situated smack dab in the inner city, less than 3 miles from my house, and across the street from Mondawmin Mall. I was very familiar with the area, but being a student at a magnet school during the year, I didn’t attend the schools in my neighborhood. This summer, the summer of 2003, I found myself taking classes with students from all over Baltimore City, and it took some getting used to. Some of my summer school classmates were absolutely fearless. They blatantly smoked weed on the way to school and openly skipped classes. There were fights every day for the most trivial things, tempers flared by the lack of air conditioning. The students, from schools all over Baltimore city, formed cliques according to what neighborhoods they lived in. Some girls were openly pregnant and many summer romances began. They did things that my mom would probably skin me for, and I silently watched, most times. I was quickly pegged as a nerd with a mean streak and a slick mouth, so I was left alone by potential bullies. On the bright side, I was also quickly pegged as an academic leader. Many of my new classmates came to me for help, and I was allowed to leave early many days, as I’d finished my work early. Summer school wasn’t all bad, after all.  My best friend from school had to go too, so I was never alone. I was also able to catch up with some elementary and middle school friends that ended up going to different schools. I was able to wear some cute outfits and experiment with my style profile, as opposed to wearing a work uniform. The absolute icing on the cake was that we got to meet some cute guys that we didn’t have access to during the school year. Looking back, I realized that there were probably a few guys that were into me, but I guess hindsight is always 20/20. The summer of 2003, at Douglass High School, I realized that I liked older guys. It was when I laid eyes on Blake. I remember his full name but I don’t remember the day we met. I remember my best friend at the time urging me to speak to him, to spark a conversation, but I was so shy. Sensing it, he struck one up with me instead. Every morning before classes, we’d talk. I was never brave enough to tell him how much I liked him, but somehow, he sensed it. When summer school ended that last week of July, I walked from the building with his phone number. He wasn’t allowed to call me, as my mom was super strict, but I did call him, often. As life tends to do, our interest in each other fluxed and flowed, and eventually faded away, but the seed had been planted. After the summer of 2003, every guy I dated afterward would be older than me.

The rest of the summer went by pretty uneventfully. Other than my best friend and I sneaking on the local free chat line while our parents worked, discovering new music, blossoming into boy crazy bundles of awkwardness, and trying to invent our identities, there was nothing really new under the sun. I visited my great grandmother very often, as she only lived the next block over. After her dialysis treatments, I’d go and sit with her, in the coolness of her kitchen, watching her soap operas with her. When the sun began to go down, I’d help her weed her garden and do other tasks I’d grown accustomed to. My cousins often joked that I was her favorite, but I’d put a lot of sweat equity into that position, over the years. I still had the scars from falling into her rose bushes while weeding to prove it. However, I also received birthday cards with money in them yearly. Her porcelain doll collection had a few dolls in it that were inspired by my likes and my presence. I was trusted enough to retrieve things from her purse. She bought me my first encyclopedias and my animal facts scrapbooks. Those summer days over the years, when my mom was at work, I went everywhere with Granny, and sometimes I knew she was showing me off. I was in the kitchen when she baked and even in the pool at her physical therapy appointments. She’d even stopped me from getting in a bunch of trouble when I pushed the button on her Life Alert device, summoning the police to her house. I chuckle remembering how frustrated my mom was and smile recalling how Granny talked her down.Maybe I was the favorite, but I felt like I began to understand her, as I grew. I saw sides of her that my cousins didn’t see.  Like all of my summers before, I spent a lot of it on her quiet, homeowner’s block, the 2500 block of Quantico Avenue. She was a tough cookie, too. All the neighborhood kids knew that if a ball landed in her prize winning garden, they’d never see it again. Even the neighborhood cats knew to steer clear of her yard. Granny had the prettiest house on the block, inside and out. We spent so much time ensuring that it would remain that way, cleaning,weeding, planting,shopping, learning and talking. Every year in December, it took Mr. June Bug, the neighborhood handyman, three whole days to set up her Christmas light display. It never got old to see how magical it looked. Holiday dinners were huge events that took days to prepare for. I remember her coming to my middle school graduation, so tiny in her little pink suit, but smiling big. It was one of the first times I saw her openly proud. Granny was a petite force, a tiny old woman with huge tenacity, and I’d like to think some of it rubbed off on me. I remember almost everything she taught me. She had a hard past, and wasn’t openly affectionate. Many people thought she was mean, and sometimes she was, but moreover, she was guarded. She was unhealed from many things, and it projected, but I loved her despite it.  Some of her familial relations were strained, even with my mom, but my mother fought to teach her what love was. As the years passed, I’d like to think the lessons began to stick. This, compiled with my mom re-introducing her to gospel music, and her beginning to attend church again softened her up quite a bit. My maternal grandmother was murdered and my paternal grandmother was (and still is) very distant, but I had Granny, and she had me. I spent weekends with her in the summer of 2003, but this summer of firsts also was a summer of lasts.

My heart always beats slower when I recall this day. It was a hot, humid day in August, and school was due to start the following week. The day was pretty uneventful, with the exception of shopping for school supplies. I remember that Granny wasn’t answering her phone, but I was due to spend the weekend with her, so we just planned to go there after shopping. I don’t quite recall the details of my purchases, but I remember being with my mom. I remember leaving the neighborhood dollar store and walking across bustling Coldspring Lane, the air thick with the call and response of the neighborhood hustlers, of food smells from carryout restaurants, of expectation and city noises. I recall walking into the Rite Aid drug store that still adorns that corner til this day, and getting more stuff in preparation for my Junior year. I see myself walking out with my mom, chattering incessantly with teenaged vigor about things now too trivial for my adult mind to recall, when she shushed me gently to answer a phone call. Then, I catch flashes of her stopping in her tracks, shock etching across her face in lines of worry. I hear myself asking her what was wrong, and then, as she tells me the unthinkable, I just remember feeling weightless, the warm ground and prickly gravel becoming an unwilling seat for my stunned body.

I remember my mom reaching down to help me up, and helping me into the car, and I remember the 3 minute drive to Granny’s house being one of the most agonizing in my entire life. I realize that the feeling of the world closing in on me and my lungs feeling like oxygen was lined with shards of glass was the feelings of my first anxiety attack. We got to her house quickly and it looked the same. The stately brick row home with the blueish green outdoor carpet, the yard full of flowers that many couldn’t name, but I’d learned intimately, the white wrought iron fence and the air heavy with the scent of nature’s splendor, and the matching white doors, and it stood out as it always did. That house that she’d put so much into, with me by her side in recent years, and family members I hadn’t seen in months were there. I remember not being able to go in immediately, and then when I did, I couldn’t go up to her room, where she was. I remember my father, in a rare occurrence, trying to comfort me on the phone, and I remember my mothers arms, full of love that kept me sane in that moment. Most hauntingly,  I recall the smell of death, on the tail end of the smell of flowers, and that was when reality truly sunk in. 

Granny was gone. She missed her dialysis treatments that Thursday, and it was later revealed that she told her friend that she was tired in a phone conversation a few days before. Her blood betrayed her and she passed away in her sleep, her hands tucked under her head like she always slept, in that big, gold framed bed that I’d spent so many nights beside her in. And even as I pen this, my heart breaks into a million pieces, as I recall the events of August 28, 2003. Even now, she visits me in dreams, and I wonder what she’d think if she was still here to see me now. My aunt lives in her mother’s house now, and is the same age her mother was when she died. Though she’s since added her own touches to Granny’s house, it still smells like her scent, still creaks in the same places and still reminds me of her, some 18 years later. Each visit, like each recollection of that last summer we had together, is bittersweet.

Like the smell of freshly opened flowers spark memories, I’ll never forget the summer of 2003.

Dedicated to the Memory of:

Delores Beatrice Boone (1932-2003)

&

Mr. Kenneth AKA June Bug (2021)