No time of the year is more indicative of what Levittown is all about than the dog days of summer; backyard barbecues and pool parties under the cicada's shrill, packing the cooler and heading on down the Wantagh Parkway bound for Jones Beach or Zach's Bay, and watching the tomato plants outgrow their cages and stakes. The Levittown summer is about fine memories of LAC baseball, the pools, air-conditioned bowling lanes, block parties, July 4 fireworks at Salisbury Park, collecting butterflies in the old Vanderbilt Motor Parkway, and the prolonged twilights where there was not a care in the world save capturing the evening's first firefly or spying a shooting star against the velvety black of night. These were days when it seemed as though everything would forevermore remain as it was.

I don't wish to be accused of wallowing in nostalgic indulgence. But consider for a second just how fortunate we are to enjoy, or have enjoyed, Mr. Levitt's vision of "the good life" here in Levittown. However, much as it needs to be updated for the tatooed, pierced generation that surfs the Net, it's still extraordinary. Next time you doubt it, think about the fact that there are more places in the world like Kosovo than like Levittown.

Ponder, too, I do, on these summer days, the idle pleasures of summer times past. Susan Duncan's recently published book, Levittown, The Way We Were, is a delightful account of her girlhood in the 1950s and early '60s. It echoes an earlier work by Marion Hunt Berg Homie called Grandmother Burned Peach-pits, about growing up on the Berg farm at the corner of Hempstead Turnpike and Newbridge Road back in the '20s and '30s. Tidbits of these former times and bygone pleasures exist in the archives of the Levittown Historical Society. We know, for example, that farmer Gottleib Meyer's grandchildren loved to watch grandpa's cows lazily grazing in the field from his farm house on Division Avenue. Children in the neighborhood used to frolic in the meadows along Hempstead Turnpike near Jerusalem Avenue picking berries and playing in the shady grove of pine trees that bequeathed the appellation "Island Trees" to the future Levittown. And how many youngsters, I wonder, were enthralled by the traffic of the three rural airfields that had operated here before the war?

The farms, meadows, and airfields are long gone and the children of yesteryears have grown up and passed on and taken their fond reminisces with them. What has remained is the extraordinary capacity of Levittown to generate new memories.