Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.

When I was in college, I spent my summers on campus working on an archaeological project. In the summer after my sophomore year, I lived in my fraternity house with several other crew members, and the soundtrack of that summer was full of Boz Skaggs and Bob Seger.

One song that still sticks with me from that summer is Bob Seger’s Night Moves. There were a few night moves in the frat house, but what resonates with me most strongly is the line near the end of the song about autumn closing in. That line perfectly captured my wistful feeling as the archaeology wound down, the days grew shorter, and the school year approached.

Thinking about autumn closing in often inspires me to think about the summers of my youth and the rhythms of summer life in my leafy suburb.

Summer began at 3:15 p.m. on the last day of school. With all the excitement building up to that day, the sound of the final bell was like the sound of a cork shooting out of a bottle of champagne.

Shortly after the end of school came swimming lessons at the community pool. Many days I went to the pool for swimming lessons in the morning, went again in the afternoon with my friends, and went a third time with my family after dinner. No June was complete without at least one full-back sunburn.

The first big event of the summer was Flag Day. A man who lived two streets away from my family hosted a celebration with popsicles, a guest speaker, and hundreds of kids marching up and down the street waving flags.

Patriotism continued on the Fourth of July, which featured a morning parade, afternoon athletics, and evening fireworks. I was never in the parade, but my brother entered miniature floats a couple of times, and my father, as president of the organization that ran the community pool, sometimes rode in the back of a convertible with a thermos of Bloody Marys between his feet.

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When I was a kid, the fireworks were at the high school football stadium, and everyone went. The evening started with music and then, when it was dark enough, the sky lit up. The morning after, my friends and I crawled around the football field picking up little cubes of unburned firework stuff which we took home and set off ourselves.

After July fourth, the neighborhood began to thin out as families started taking vacations. With fewer friends around, no more holidays to celebrate, and rising temperatures, time slowed down. The dog days were upon us.

However, as August rolled along, we had something to look forward to. When I was a kid, the Ohio State Fair ran for ten or twelve days, ending on Labor Day, the day before school started. The summer before sixth grade, my friends and I were allowed to go to the fair by ourselves, and it was a big adventure.

We took two or three buses to get to the fairgrounds and spent the day riding rides, looking at animals, and eating fair food until my best friend’s mother came to pick us up. One year, I saw Sly and the Family Stone perform in the grandstand. Another year, when I happened to be flying back to Columbus with my father when the fair was going on, we sat across the aisle from Bob Hope, who was the featured grandstand performer on Labor Day.

The state fair was the highlight of August when I was a kid. As a young adult, the highlight was a golf tournament. When I was young, I played golf at a club that had three big tournaments each summer, the member-guest, the club championship, and the member-member, also called the Calcutta.

The Calcutta was a high-stakes affair. Entry fees went to a prize fund. The night before the tournament, the teams were auctioned off, and the auction money went into a pool that was paid out to the owners of the highest-finishing teams. On top of that, there was parimutuel betting.

I played in the Calcutta four times in my early twenties and considered it a rite of passage from youth to adulthood. My first year, my team finished next to last. The next year we finished third, and the year after that, we won. My father never finished better than second, so I won some bragging rights along with the prize money.

The Calcutta really was the end of summer. The year my father’s team finished second, the tournament ended with a two-team playoff, in the dark, with the course lit up by car headlights.

The rhythms of summer are not as vivid to me today as they were when I was younger, but all it takes is a few notes of Bob Seger’s song to remind me of the bittersweet feeling of autumn closing in.