Big

Shortly after I entered the world, my mother was wheeled on a gurney out into a hallway at St. Paul’s Midway Hospital in order to make way for another delivery. It wasn’t particularly distressing to her though; she was just glad to be in the air-conditioned hospital on a day my parents claim was the hottest they’d ever experienced. In reality, the entire drought summer of 1988 was sweltering, with temperatures peaking at 105 degrees in late July, not to mention the near-hundred percent humidity that saturated the air so much that you could have just as easily drank the air as breathed it. Eight blocks north of Midway, where the heat induced a massive spike in births, I came home to big two-story Victorian house that still had piping for gas lights sticking out of the walls. Needless to say there was no air-conditioning. There is no escaping such infernal weather without this modern life-saver; the nights are not cool enough to allow the house to bleed out some of the day’s fire. Instead, I was incubated for an extra three months, clothed only in diapers until the heat abated in late September.

Where does one escape such heat? Once, when I was about ten years old, my family visited my aunt and uncle in Milwaukee on a day when the temperature soared above one hundred. There house being about as old as ours and similarly lacking in the modern Midwestern necessity of air-conditioning, we were forced to retreat, to the great delight of my older brother and I, to a Holiday Inn, where we all gathered around the blasting industrial AC unit before taking a swim in the four foot deep hotel pool. That night we dined on Pizza Hut, delivered right to our room, and my brother and I stayed up late watching a movie on TNT while my parents shared a few rounds of Milwaukee’s most famous export with my relatives in the next room.

In middle school, long after moving to Oregon, where the dry heat of the summers was laughable by comparison, I passed long afternoons at the local YMCA with my friend Sven, whose name fit his brilliant blue eyes and cool Nordic temperament. We share memories from that summer that most of the kids I went to school with do: doing cannonballs into the deep end of the YMCA’s pool, carrying the ten pound rubber diving brick up from the bottom, testing to see how long we could sit beneath the ten feet of highly chlorinated water, all in the hour and a half each afternoon that that pool was deserted before an onslaught of young day-campers drove us out at 3:00. Our trips to the pool weren’t so much about getting out of the heat, as about not letting ourselves stew in the doldrums of an unstructured summer vacation. The years passed and our interests and circles of influence grew apart; Sven and I were never closer than in those many weeks in which we rode our bikes to the Y, stopping at a convenience store and buying up a few bucks’ worth of candy or ice cream on the way home.

I can’t deny the effect of the American movie industry upon my summer habits either. The “Summer Blockbuster” has been a staple in Hollywood for years, as the producers of these films reason that many people (especially those without air-conditioning in their homes) would seek refuge at their local cinema. The cool breeze billowing from the wall ducts is often more amenable to the fancy of movie-goers in the summertime than the films themselves.

The day I was born, June 3, 1988, the movie “Big” premiered to great critical acclaim and audience appeal. I would only come to know it from its presentation on TV, where “Big” has found its home on AMC in amongst the black and white Westerns and slap-stick comedies of the thirties and forties. The movie stars Tom Hanks, before his rise to superstardom with “Philadelphia Story” and “Forrest Gump,” and David Moscow, whose participation in the Disney musical “Newsies” had already made him familiar to me, as I had, by the age of seven or eight, seen that movie enough times to have every word in the script and every lyric in the songs memorized (by the accounts of others of my age, such an obsession was not uncommon). “Big” tells a story of a boy who wishes he could be big, grown-up, no longer subjected to the trials and tribulations of pre-teen adolescence. The next morning he wakes to find his outward appearance has been changed to that of thirty-year-old Tom Hanks, but he is still the same twelve-year-old boy on the inside. Hilarity ensues as he tries to navigate the adult world with the mentality of a kid, experiencing the pressures of work and his first romantic encounter with a woman. According to IMDB, the director first shot the entire movie with the young David Moscow performing Hanks’s entire role in order that the older actor could inhabit an accurate portrayal of his “younger self” in the real movie. What emerged from this was a great performance that really got to the heart of what it means to be a kid and what it means to be an adult.

Now, when I visit family, I don’t head into the next room to play with my cousins, or simply sit and watch TV while devouring Pizza Hut. I hardly ever go to the pool, except occasionally to swim laps when I’m feeling guilty about my eating habits. Summers are characterized by tedious work. As the unavoidable onrush of time has swept me up and carried me from that incubator of a house on Minnehaha Ave in St. Paul to the hallowed halls of Pacific University, I can’t help but feel that I, like Josh Baskin in “Big,” would choose to go back to being twelve if given the opportunity. While it would seem fair to sit back and marvel at my present condition, would it not be even more marvelous to go back and enjoy it once again?

Sources: IMDB, “GRAPHICAL CLIMATOLOGY OF MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL AREA TEMPERATURES, PRECIPITATION, AND SNOWFALL (1820-PRESENT)” by Charles Fisk < http://home.att.net/~minn_climo/>