The Tiny Delights of Summer in the City

My fellow Brooklynites, all you fine folk who are not sunbathing in the Hamptons or frolicking at the Jersey Shore at present, I offer to you an assortment of summer city delights hiding in plain sight.

What city-dwellers often love best about summer in the city is, well, escaping it. I’m not going to pretend I don’t agree. Nothing says freedom like speeding down the interstate on a scorching August day, the wind whipping your hair, skyscrapers in your rear-view window. 

Still, for most of us, that long-awaited vacation only comprises a week or so of a long, hot summer, and we’d do well to find contentment in pleasures closer to home. So, my fellow Brooklynites, all you fine folk who are not sunbathing in the Hamptons or frolicking at the Jersey Shore at present, I offer to you an assortment of summer city delights hiding in plain sight.

The First Lick of an Italian Icey.

It’s a dog day in August. The air’s soupy, but a kind of soup you’d never want to eat . . . split pea, maybe. Every part of you is coated with sweat, so you’re sticky, and puffy, too, like a microwaved marshmallow. Because you’re a parent, you’re holding way too many things: your purse, your kid’s backpack, somebody’s half-eaten dumpling, a random Pokemon Christmas ornament likely laden with bedbugs that your kid has insisted on adopting from a FREE STUFF box on the sidewalk. You feel like a camel with no water left in her hump. You are depletion itself. 

But hark! What lies ahead? Is it a mirage, or could it be a pizzeria with an icey freezer out front? Your kid sees it too and clamors for an icey. Though you’ve spent too much money today and they’ve already eaten too many sweets, and just fifteen minutes ago, they were behaving so abominable that you proclaimed, “No dessert all week!” you say, “Sure.” Because you know this icey—and this icey alone—has the power to renew you. 

You order your icey in a squeezy cup because that’s how you always had it as a kid, and it somehow tastes better when the dregs are sucked from a sodden, sticky, folded-up heap in your palm Your order rainbow because you’re no amateur and even though everyone knows it’s just three colors, far from a proper rainbow, it’s plenty close enough. The mirage man behind the freezer releases his scooper into your squeezy cup, packing it down so the shape is that of Bozo the clown’s head—mostly bald with side tufts. 

You don’t even wait to pay before you take the first lick. It is cold and tart and sweet and perfect. It’s the taste of summer. 

The Rush of Cool When You Enter a Subway Car. 

Not to get all “I walked three miles to school barefoot in the snow” on you here, but I will submit for your consideration the fact that subway cars were not all air conditioned until 1993. Maybe this is why I relish the rush of cold air that greets me like a flirty lover when I step onto a subway car in summer. 

And, for the record, it was way more than three miles. 

Dipping Your Feet into the Sprinklers.

I won’t deny it: the sprinkler offers more annoyances than pleasures. All manner of perils lurk in its fetid puddles, from shattered glass to cox sackie. And that’s to say nothing of the accidents bound to happen when hordes of small humans with zero impulse control and piss-poor motor skills get very, very slippery. My son once chipped a tooth when his mouth collided with another child’s forehead. 

But there is a pleasure, small but incontrovertible, in giving yourself over to the sprinkler. You won’t surrender fully to its siren song the way your kids do, and let yourself get drenched, but you’ll dip a proverbial, and literal, toe. Maybe even ten. 

Octogenerians Sitting in Lawn Chairs on the Sidewalk Enjoying the Breeze on a Perfect July Evening.

Because youth may be wasted on the young, but Brooklyn is for everyone. 

The Fat Legs of Babies Wearing Onesies.

I don’t know why we want to eat babies—and I never will, because I just googled, “Why do people want to eat babies?” and let’s just say it was an error in judgment. 

What I do know is that while babies are reasonably cute when bundled in winter garb, they are exponentially more delicious—that is, adorable—in their summer best, plump legs kicking with the kind of unaccountable glee only a baby can manage.

Coney Freaking Island. Absolutely All of It. 

The crinkle fries eaten with a tiny red pitchfork and the Famous Nathan hot dogs that snap! when you sink your teeth in. The dozen competing speakers blasting different music as you walk down the boardwalk. The frozen custard, silky and cool. The brazen seagulls who steal your sandwich, and who, if they could talk, would undoubtedly do so in a Brooklyn accent. The Parachute Drop, which my father used to ride as a little boy, and which looms still, iconic but ornamental. The Wonder Wheel, whose name says it all. 

The sand so dirty you can feel the pathogens coating your feet as you mince over it. And, of course, the ocean. Magnificent. Ruthless. And just right there, in the middle of the greatest city in the world. As if we didn’t have more than our fair share of grandeur already.