Childhood summers were mostly waiting and that was the point.

I don't think I understood this at the time. At the time it was unbearable. Ten in the morning in July, the day already hot, nothing scheduled, nobody home, the television showing things for adults or things for babies, and the enormous flat expanse of the afternoon lying ahead like a parking lot. I remember lying on the floor. Specifically on the floor, on my back, because the floor was cooler than the couch, staring at a ceiling I had memorized, saying out loud to no one that I was bored, as though it were a medical condition and somebody might come.

Nobody came. That was the point too.

The floor

Something happens on the floor if you stay there long enough. I want to be precise about it because I think it's the most important thing that ever happened to me and I have no evidence for it.

You lie there and you are bored and it is awful. Then, at some point, without any transition, you aren't bored. You are thinking about something. It's never the thing you were supposed to think about. It's a crack in the ceiling that looks like a river, and then it's rivers, and then it's a river you saw once, and then it's a story about a river that you're apparently now telling yourself, with characters, and one of them has a boat, and you've been on the floor for forty minutes and you've built a whole country.

Nobody assigned the country. It came up out of the boredom the way water comes up out of sand when you dig at the beach. You dig and there is nothing and you dig and there is nothing and then the hole is wet.

I built most of what I'm on that floor. I didn't know it. I thought I was wasting the summer.

Waiting

The other thing summers were was waiting. Waiting for a ride. Waiting for a friend to be allowed out. Waiting for a parent to finish a phone call. Waiting in a car, in the back, with the window down, for an adult to finish an errand that took, in my memory, several years.

The waiting wasn't empty. That's what I didn't see. The waiting was where I learned to look at things. The back of a strip mall. The way heat comes off a car roof. The expression on the face of a man in the next car who was also waiting. The exact sound of a particular kind of cicada that I could identify now, forty years later, by ear, though I couldn't tell you its name. I had nothing to do, and so I did the only thing left, which was to notice, and noticing turned out to be the thing I'd eventually get paid for, in one form or another, for the rest of my life.

You can't teach a child to notice. You can only fail to give them anything else to do.

Staring

There was a specific activity, and I don't know if it had a name, that I would call staring.

Not at anything. Out. Out a window, at a wall, at the middle distance, for a period of time that would alarm a modern parent. Eyes open, nothing happening on the outside, everything happening on the inside. It was the closest I've come to what I now understand people go on retreats to learn. I did it at eleven, for free, on a Tuesday, because the alternative was the ceiling.

I lost it somewhere. I couldn't tell you when. But there was a day when I stopped being able to stare, and started needing something in front of me, and I think that day was the day I got the first device with a screen that fit in a pocket. The staring stopped because the pocket had a thing in it that was always more interesting than the wall, and the wall lost, every time, forever.

The pocket

I'm not going to write the essay about phones. It has been written and I've nothing to add except this.

The phone didn't kill the boredom. It killed the floor. The boredom is still there, I feel it a dozen times a day, that little flat drop when a thing ends and the next thing hasn't started. What is gone is the part after. The forty minutes. The hole getting wet. I feel the drop and I reach, and the reaching takes a quarter of a second, and the country never gets built, because the country needed the awful part, and I've not let the awful part run since I was nineteen.

That's the loss. Not the time. The staring.

Trying to get it back

I've tried, in the last few years, to get it back on purpose. It's embarrassing. A grown adult, lying on a floor, having removed the phone to another room, deliberately trying to be bored. It doesn't work at first. The first ten minutes are just the drop, over and over, the hand going to a pocket that's empty, the mind casting around for a thing and finding none and getting annoyed. It's like trying to fall asleep by trying.

But if you stay. If you stay past the annoyance, past the point where a reasonable person would get up. Something is still down there. It's slower than it was. It's shyer. But the crack in the ceiling still looks like a river, and the river still goes somewhere, and last month, on a floor, I thought of a thing I had been trying to think of for a year, and it just arrived, the way it used to, out of the sand.

So it's still there. It's just under something. And the something is a quarter of a second long, and I have to decide, a dozen times a day, not to spend it.

The parking lot

The afternoon still lies there, sometimes, like a parking lot. I'm older and it happens less, there is always something, but every so often a Sunday opens up flat and hot with nothing in it and I feel the old dread, the floor-dread, the nobody-is-coming.

And I've started to think of it as the best thing that can happen. Nothing to do and all day to do it. It is the exact condition under which I became a person, and I didn't choose it then, and I can barely manage to choose it now, and it is free, and it's lying right there on the floor, waiting for me to get bored enough to notice.