When we were young, we had regrets, but these regrets were different than the regrets we have now. When I was 17, I once wore red Lotto shorts with a tan polo shirt on a date. I regret this. I also once drove in a car with a friend from Williams Bay to Lake Geneva one sultry summer night around that time, and when we passed a clutch of similarly aged girls walking down Highway 50 with their thumbs out, we drove right past them. I regret that too. But these are youthful regrets and they are easily forgotten and pose no significance to my life as I see it today.
When we become adults, our regrets grow more serious and the effects more lasting. I thought about going to law school, but I didn’t. Some days, I regret that. That guy who hiked through those boulders and ended up cutting off his own arm, I’m sure that’s a regret. Some regrets are life and death regrets, others are lifestyle regrets, but scrape away all of the lasting impact or momentary annoyance, and they are all just regrets. While I’ve had many, one day during the past April I made a decision that would serve to save me from a winter of regret. I was going to push my summer to the absolute limit.
This isn’t to say that I haven’t pushed it before. I have worked to enjoy summer, and lest you assume that it isn’t work to push a summer to the brink, I assure you that it is. There were nights last summer that found me tired. Whether through work or through play or through the combination of both that is my life, many nights the setting sun cast its dying light on my tired self. It would have been easy on those nights to settle in with a television and a worn out couch, to while away the summer evening with windows open and air cranked. But that isn’t what I did.
On those nights I would fight the urge of complacency. I would grab a kid, or two, or a dog of whomever would willingly accompany me, and I would head towards the boat. Many nights, the sun was low as I’d speed East down North Walworth Road. I’d make quick work of the miles that kept me from the water, and during the hottest of nights that this past July had to offer, I would leave the air conditioning and the sleepiness behind in my literal wake. The water was warm this summer. So warm that swimming to a buoy tethered boat in low light was not a chore as much as it was a refreshing privilege. I would swim to the boat and I would swim from the boat, and I would lay on the bow and look up at the stars and drift. One night I tried to point out some constellations to my daughter.
Who could regret a night like that or a summer full of them? Those nights came on Tuesdays as often as they came on Saturdays, and at least one night I was rained on. Another night I was joined by friends and we made the slow drive to Lake Geneva and shamefully ordered a pizza from Gino’s East. We ate that pizza on the boat and watched a storm roll East from Fontana until it faded somewhere behind the Geneva Inn. We left the pier that night and slipped through a dead calm pond and returned through a whipped up sea.
These summer memories will keep me warm this winter. Even the coldest of summer memories, those early June mornings of repeatedly throwing my cast-net off the bow into 50 degree water, soaking my arms and my jeans in the process, even those memories will count as summer when viewed through the icy isolation of a January night. I acknowledge that my summer moments are more easily entertained than yours might be. I understand that taking a ten minute drive to the lake is easier than your 80 minute drive. But I also know that there are weekends in your memory right this very moment that weren’t spent as they should have been. There is a weekend in July or one in September, or perhaps two during that warm spell of early October, that were not spent at the lake in the way they could have been. There is regret in knowing that summer was not fully owned, but there is redemption on the horizon.
Twenty-six weeks from today it will be Memorial Day. Another Lake Geneva summer will have started, with or without you. That summer to come will offer you two decidedly different experiences, and it is decision time. There will be regret, masquerading as comfortable nights on comfortable couches inside air conditioned suburban living rooms. There will also be redemption, offered only to those who choose to commit to a summer that is the first summer of the rest of our lives. If you think I’m being melodramatic, it’s obviously been far too long since you last curled your toes over the edge of a white pier and jumped.