As I look towards this weekend, I see that it is all about making that leap to the new adventures that always seem unique to summer. On Sunday,  #2-Son heads off for a 6-week tour that will take him along the old Silk Road into the depths of westernmost China. He’s off getting his last jab right now, and tomorrow I teach him how to pack all his worldly possessions into the type of old-fashioned backpack I remember using during my time bumming around Israel and Europe.  I wasn’t much older than he is now when I did that, and my own trip still feels — well, not like yesterday, but not like decades ago either.  Amazing.

And #1-Son is just starting rehearsals for a terrific new play he will be acting in this summer up at the Edinburgh Festival.  He’s been at the Festival with a play once before, but this time it’s a big deal venue and a prime time slot.  As a young, up-and-coming actor this is a great experience, putting him in front of a much larger audience than ever.  
Poor husband’s adventures are more crammed in amidst the daily grind of dispensing his wisdom in offices worldwide, but still, he’ll get his holidays on golfcourses and eventually on the beach back in the States.
Ah, the beach.  That’s where I’m headed.  This is normally a schizophrenic time of year for me.  I’m lucky enough to have an island home that I go to each summer, where I can work, rest, see family, cook too many dinners, entertain too many guests, spend too many hours in the sun, and generally just have some hot fun in the summertime.  But the transition is always difficult. I’m always reluctant to leave the city, worried about all the work I have to do, and afraid of all the events and people I’ll miss.  And then when it’s time to come home, I have to forcibly pry my clinging hands from the door post crying “why oh why must I go back to that god-forsaken vortex of too many people and too much commerce and too much…everything?” 
 And this year is even worse, because this year I also have to toss away my “retailer’s fedora” and dig up my dusty “artist’s beret.”  This year I’ve done far more selling than writing, and the great adventure — and the great challenge — of this summer is trying to get back to doing what I supposedly am all about in the first place…creating.  Time to stop selling and start producing; to stop explaining about Moscow and start wondering about Phnom Penh; to stop looking outside of myself and start excavating those places inside that most people happily let lie unnoticed.  And, to be honest, I’m frightened.
Just because I’ve written one novel doesn’t mean I can write another one, does it?  Just because I once discovered those hidden images and unexpressed emotions doesn’t mean I can find them again.  Maybe all that creativity got tired of waiting and upped sticks to find some other, more attentive mortal.  Now, if any other writer said this sort of crap to me I know exactly what I would say.  I’d say (and have said) don’t be silly, you are who you are, whatever talent/craft/wisdom was there before is there now.  Just get on with it.  But, as you know, your own crap is harder to let go of (so to speak) and I am now plagued by a bad case of the “what if’s.”
JJ has wisely talked in her blog about writing 100 words a day.  I suppose it’s like taking baby steps — you just put one foot in front of the other and eventually you’ve walked a mile.  I need to keep that in mind. And listen to this — just as I wrote that last sentence, a clap of thunder reverberated through an otherwise cloudless sky, coming out of nowhere.  Really!  It’s true!  It’s the weird sort of meteorological electricity you get on the island all the time in the summer, but which I rarely see here in London.  A wayward flash arising from who-knows-where.  Okay, it’s not a particularly original metaphor, but a metaphor it is nonetheless, and maybe

 it’s a sign that the writer in me is closer to the surface than I had feared.
So my family and I will all be a bit busy with packing and travelling over the next few days, and then I’ll be heading off to the island for the rest of the summer.  I’ll still keep blogging, but it might be a bit more sporadic for a while.  Please keep checking in, though, and I’ll check in with all of you.  Come to think of it, this year, in all of you, I have a bit of my “real life” that I can bring along with me to the other side of the planet.  It’s a real comfort and I’m grateful for it. I won’t be gone long.
And in the meantime, what’s the summer without some good ole’ music.  Take it away, Sly…..