Hello. I’d like to welcome you all to the start of summer. It’s finally here.

The streets are filled with bodies and machines. Muscle cars are rolling. The buff types and the tattooed wannabes are throwing footballs in the street. Street corners are jammed with people as excitable and rowdy as football fans outside a stadium at game time.

A downtown saunter I can only describe as the “summertime strut” is appearing all over the place. People are swaggering, by god. Summer. At long last, summer. Hey, don’t look so bewildered. I’m as confused as you are. I thought summer was coming to an end. It’s like the flickering away of a dream when the chill of September hits the air. I’ve been feeling that slap of reality lately in the chill of the night.

And yet, there they are. In some sections of our community, the boys of summer are just now appearing rather than wandering away for the cold spell. The streets are crowded again. Clouds of people are buzzing like downtown bees around street corner hives. Hot weather brawls appear to be just beginning. It boggles the mind. I expected them in July. Police expected them in July. Instead, the hordes are gathering closer to October, like migratory birds who went on benders before flying off to their destinations. On a steamy night in July, I took an intern into downtown Lewiston. This, I assured her, is what our inner city looks like. Seething with violence. Trembling with agitation. An area that writhes with corruption and rage.

Well-behaved, and boring

Only it wasn’t. People were out comparing celebrity gossip or preparing notes for the upcoming school year, as far as I could tell. There were about three people out, and they were all well-behaved.

The intern was not impressed.You can’t predict the mood of our downtown areas, I swear you can’t. I’ve tried for years. I’ve tried to impress people with my foresight, and I’ve failed miserably.

I’ve consulted with experts. I’ve picked the brains of criminal psychologists. I even corresponded with some egghead once who studied exclusively the effects of weather on criminal activity.

Diddly, that’s what any of us know.

So I went out and found a new source. This one does not have a degree in psychology, criminology or any other -ology that I know of. He just happens to live downtown. His name is Jamie, and we met at a brawl on Birch Street the other night. He was watching the same action I was, as though we were friends taking in a football game. No big deal. Just another mix-up involving dozens of people and cops, instead of referees trying to sort it all out.

He lives down there. I visit the block frequently because my office tends to be wherever violence explodes. We talked a little, reviewed the punches being thrown and the police intervention. Then we parted ways.

Another night. Late September. So cool, you almost needed a coat. The passage of one season to another so abrupt, it seems cruel.

I shivered. I shuddered. I crept back to my car and turned on the heat. I went home. Night turned to another day. The calendar switched to autumn.

Finally, an explanation

I called Jamie back when I noticed that the downtown area still looked like a Boston suburb lately. I wanted to know why it looks that way even though the air keeps cooling and the night comes so much sooner.

Jamie, who rides a bicycle to get around and doesn’t have any textbooks on the subject, answered me quickly and concisely. Answered me, in other words, in a way that the experts on the subject could not do.

“It’s all about the change of season. It’s not much more than that,” he said. “People are having parties – parties to end it all. They know the end of summer is coming and they want a last hurrah.” Okay. Fair enough. But day after day, the downtown bees keep buzzing? Even when the waning of summer should force them back inside?

“They spill out onto the streets, yeah,” said Jamie, who lives this life, rather than observes it as a profession. “Things get nuts and people move outside. They know it’s coming to an end. They want to cram it all in.”

The dying throb of summer, in other words. Why didn’t the sociologists tell me that?

Maybe because they don’t live downtown. They only take occasional field trips, jot a few notes and then rush back to the office to write award-winning papers.

Still, I take rides around Lewiston and Auburn every night. Still, I’m enthralled by the bandannas and bravado that exist there.

In Auburn, shots were fired outside a residential neighborhood the other night. In Lewiston, serious fights are almost endless. I’d expected it in July. Then I let my guard down.

“That’s the way it works around here, LaFlamme,” one cop told me. “We all expected it to be a lively summer and it wasn’t. Now it’s later in the season and you can’t let your guard down.”

But I think Jamie said it better, in his 20-year-old, street poet way. He was on his bike and riding away and asking about maybe getting some work as a freelance photographer.

“Sometimes,” he said, “people just want to go nuts. And when you want to go nuts, you do it wherever you are. Wherever you are and no matter what time of year it is.”


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