Summer is creeping ever closer. In fact, here it comes! But first, a look back.

Back when crispy M&Ms were still in stores I used to lifeguard at the pool down the block from us. Most summer days the pool would get packed, and the only catch to swimming in it was that beforehand you'd have to flash your Town of Cheektowaga resident ID card to the attendants working at the front entrance. Cheektowaga is a blue-collar town just to Buffalo's east, comprised of people whose families lived on Buffalo's Eastside before black people moved there.

Monday marks the unofficial beginning of summer. For Here Comes Summer, we asked folks to explain its magic. And is there anything more magical than appearing on TV?

"God gives each of us only what we can handle" was advice a lesbian bike messenger and Brussels Griffon owner gave me when I expressed guilt about our relative suffering. She had just shared with me a harrowing story about growing up poor in the South with a father who sexually abused her, following my own disclosure that I had a terrible time at sleep-away camp when I was ten.

Summer unofficially begins on Monday, so we're takin' a look at it. This is: Here Comes Summer. Hey, so you resent those teachers with three whole months off? Well! Do read on.

We're looking at a modest vacation this summer, Robyn and me. Our oldest daughter and her husband live in Portland, Oregon; we're going to take the better part of a week to drive lazily up the coast in a rental car, spend a few days with Emily and Blake, and fly home. Sounds pretty good right about now, as I'm scrambling to complete my grades for the spring semester.

Nine days: that will be [...]

Memorial Day, the unofficial beginning of Summer 2010, arrives on Monday, so we asked our contributors to reflect on the season. We'll be sharing their thoughts all week. Here comes summer!

I worked at my father's industrial safety-equipment business on an assembly line manufacturing safety glasses. While the job was as monotonous as you might imagine, particularly for a high school student trying to enjoy summer vacation-try screwing 10,000 eyeglass temples onto half as many frames with an electric screwdriver and you'll get the idea-it introduced me to a visceral tedium I would later understand to be a foundation of modern life. It also taught me to relate [...]

In a couple of hours, summer unofficially begins, so should you take the kids to the mall, or the movies, or to the arcade? You are incorrect! And here's why.

You did what you could during the Virginia summer days to either sit by a pool or on a beach or avoid being outside altogether, and at night you reclined on the porch or in the yard and let whatever small breezes the night could strum up wash over you, cooling your sweat. Otherwise, you were inside all day and all night, cooled and even frozen by the artificial cold air that pumped through every building in town. [...]

In the immortal words of the philosopher Will Smith, "lay back and relax, 'cause this is summertime." It's an excellent point because, with Memorial Day just around the corner, here comes summer.

Summer is the invention of privileged classes in the northern latitudes, a time of traveling and ease. You don't see tropical writers going into paroxysms over summer. Between Cancer and Capricorn, summer isn't that different from the other seasons. And when it is, it's a time of heat, when work becomes particularly sweaty and oppressive and you long for the cooling downpour of the monsoon or "the rains." This is probably true in the southern latitudes, [...]

It's hot out! And this is the unofficial start of summer. Hence our series of essays this week: Here Comes Summer!

My friend Sarah [not her real name!] and I were wandering the streets of Nice, wearing 60-pound backpacks. We needed a place to stay. I hadn't made a reservation. I hadn't thought you needed to make reservations at the kind of cheap youth hostels I'd been planning on staying in. My Lonely Planet guide hadn't mentioned that part, or at least I hadn't paid attention. Let me tell you, should you ever plan on making such a trip, to a vacation destination like Nice in the middle of [...]

In preparation for Memorial Day on Monday-the unofficial beginning of Summer 2010-we asked writers to reflect on the season. We'll be publishing Here Comes Summer all week.

When Henry James first met Oscar Wilde in Boston in 1882, he told Wilde that he was very nostalgic for London.

"Really? You care for places? The world is my home," Wilde replied flamboyantly (and, erroneously, alas, though it was true for just a little while.) Did that ever make Henry James mad! He really ought to have known better, because Wilde was an incorrigible tease. James was all wanting to be We Sophisticates with Wilde, I guess, but Wilde wouldn't, because [...]