At weddings, I still dance the Mashed Potato, not because I like dancing, but because I really love mashed potatoes, with a little volcano divot on top … full of melted butter.

Have you ever met anyone so taken with the minuscule and mundane: lashing rains, chili dogs, little churches on the edge of town?

Dear gawd, I hope not.

When I lie in the summer grass, which is often, I harken back to the yards of my Midwestern youth –plush, shag-carpet lawns, the pride-and-joy of Barrington, Illinois, which to this day has the prettiest front yards the world has ever seen.

To run barefoot through such grass was a sacred experience. Your feet turned green. When you fell, your knees and elbows turned green too.

As kids, we’d dogpile atop each other in that grass, all these green kids growing itchy in the neck, till the moms called us home to dinner.

Devon! Dave! Huckleberry!

The lawns of my hometown were the carpets of kings. When I reached a certain age, I started to spot opportunity. Like Vanderbilt, like Carnegie.

At age 11, I started a mowing service to care for the beloved Barrington yards. I charged $2 for a typical yard, $3 if it were really big.

My dream? Wrigley Field would call. My price: five bucks.

It was a fiercely competitive business, much like movies or pro sports. Andy, my buddy, started a rival lawn service, as did the Wagner boys.

We did decent work, though it was not the clipped-to-perfection work you see now, done by grown men with trucks. Yet I’d like to think customers got their $2 worth.

Mowing a yard in the Midwest heat and humidity was the best workout a kid could ever have. You can still see those difficult hillsides in my calves, which have their own biceps.

My grandpa bought me a small riding mower, plus a push power mower for edging and the steep yards. I only flipped that power mower once, while dragging it up a berm.

No parent rushed to see how I was doing. No one said a kid should never be doing that. So I flipped the hot mower back on its feet. Started on the first yank.

By the time I was 12, I’d accumulated the vast fortune of $150. I was dependent on absolutely no one. Not for a dipped cone. Not for a new pair of Keds.

By age 15, most of the other kids who mowed lawns quit. It had taken its toll on them. Yard care is a tough biz. And by then, some of the bored moms were hitting on the teens who mowed their lawns.

I saw that as a perk, though never indulged. To be honest, the pretty moms kind of scared me, in their tube tops and mocha tans. Seriously, I couldn’t handle their leggy daughters, let alone their incredible moms.

In fall, as the nights cooled, the lawns were even more luscious –rich, like good hotel bedding.

By late September, it was almost too much for me, these thick lawns now covered in gowns of maple and oak. I’d rake, then mow. The grass stayed neon-green till almost November. The color of money.

I thought of all this the other day when someone mentioned “Summer of ’42,” the wistful book and movie, which were hits back then. The film starred Jennifer O’Neill, who would go on to marry nine times. It’s really a miracle I wasn’t somehow involved.

“Summer of ’42” is a celebration of heat. It is a study of impossible passion and a lot of sultry, very human things I still don’t quite understand.

The summer smiles, the summer knows,

And unashamed, she sheds her clothes,

The summer smoothes the restless sky,

And lovingly she warms the sand on which you lie …

To this day, I cherish American suburbs,  the sounds of children, the crickets at night. I love them even as they cook in these last weeks of August.

No wonder I still get pangs of anxiety over back-to-school sales. No! Not school. Not that cattle call … the conformity … the jungle of junior high showers. Not yet!

I’d think, then, as I do now: Please, Lord, do me this one thing:

Give us one more month of cannonballs and Marco Polo, banana Popsicles and roasted marshmallows, till the hot mashed potatoes start plopping on our dinner plates, the surest sign summer is finally done with us.

A buttery puddle on top. Like a sunset.

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