Summer has begun. Three bareback months of seratonin, caffeine, and sinew; unmistakably heralded in by its unified package of “little things”- ice cream and strudel for breakfast, pool-hopping and skinny-dipping, indifference to time and duty, invincibility, pointlessness, songs that make the chest hurt, the nitrous quality of the summernight’s air- Time has come full circle, and its difficult to extricate this summer from the memory of last. Here we were, once again, playing Putt-Putt in the dark, after closing hours, using hands and mops in lieu of putters, crouching behind fiberglass elephants and giraffes at every passing motorist. Or, once again, I find myself swimming in a downpour, halfassing frontflips into the pool; streaking, at high noon, across blue-nosed golf-courses, amid stunned fifty-somethings and a frightened family of bunny rabbits. Raspberry-picking in Appalachia, eating four raspberries for every one I weigh. Wowed by the pyrotechnics of compact discs in microwaves. Helpless against crushes on every young girl with a dew of perspiration on her cheeks and her neck. Thrown into the arms of Pain by skateboard disasters, curling up insect-like until the blood stops and breathing flows. Nostalgia for the present: Charlottesville in the summer really makes me think long and hard about the possibilities of paradise on earth.