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For many of us, summer started with Memorial Day weekend.

Not me.

My summer started on Thursday, an hour after daybreak, near the spot many of us call The Corner.

I was stumbling sleepy-eyed past Key’s Barber Shop, walking my dog along Walker Avenue when I saw two bleary-eyed faces I knew well from the time when my professional and personal life involved more nights than days.

Back then — way back when, it feels like sometimes — I covered the Triad’s mercurial arts and entertainment scene. I chased revelers and talented right-brainers who thrived way past midnight and sometimes way after last call.

Well, I looked up and there they were: My singer-friend cradling an unopened bottle of wine; my guitarist-friend clutching a nearly empty green bottle of beer.

I knew that look all too well. They hadn’t slept a wink.

“WELL,” my singer-friend said in a hoarse shout from the sidewalk, as loud as a circus ringmaster. “LOOK WHO IT IS!”

Summertime is made for that kind of serendipity.

Neighborhood pools open. MUSEP starts. Bats ding. Grills sizzle. Gloves pop. Fun Fourth continues. Thirsty Thursdays and First Fridays become party shorthand for a time to swill, swig and people-watch.

And all kinds of reunions unfold. We wear those funny, little name tags, with our young face wearing a bad haircut and a yearbook smile, and we can hardly believe we looked like that. Ever.

Anyway, summers are good for memories like this. We step off our treadmill, downshift our lives and anchor ourselves outside to start meandering conversations while fireflies blink around us in the day’s last light.

But believe me. You’ll find yourself in one of those spots, and you’ll hear voices that’ll rattle your brain and make you realize the years clicked by way too fast.

That happened for me last Thursday. My summer of 2009 had started, with my two friends on a sidewalk.The verbal backslaps, a staple of any summer, had begun.

“Do you still live in the Triad area?” my singer-friend asked. “How have you been?”

We talked about the economy. We’ll all talk about the economy this summer. It’s become personal for many of us. We’ve all been hit by what some call the Lesser Depression. But on Thursday, beer in hand, eyeglasses perched on his nose, my guitar-friend had a better description.

“It just sucks,” he told me.

My guitar-friend doesn’t have a job, my singer-friend gets by on local bar gigs every week, and the local music scene continues to limp along as musicians struggle even harder as they follow their creative muse.

But my musician friends both played last night so they had some money to jingle in their pockets. And they were just getting up. Or at least that’s what they told me. Of course, I didn’t believe them. I know that look. I’ve had that look. But unlike them, I never wore it well.

“How’s the ink?” my singer-friend asked.

It’s not much better, I tell him.

“Well, at least you have a job,” my guitar-friend responds.

And that’s how it goes, for 10 minutes. We talk movies and music, fathers and sons, Obama and Bush and the tenuous relationship of airline tickets, bacon and a trip to Pittsburgh.

That’s about all I can say in a family newspaper. But I can say we laughed.

That’s a good thing. I had often watched my singer-friend channel Marvin Gaye from a local stage, and I once slept curled up and cold in a van seat, just behind my guitar-friend, as I chased the story of him and his band going after the Holy Grail of amateur blues in the City that Elvis Built: Memphis, Tenn.

I hadn’t been in their universe in years. But there they were. My two friends on a sidewalk. The passage of years just melted away.

After 10 minutes, bottles in hand, they left. I went home. They went ... somewhere. But before we exited left and right, I got from my singer-friend another look I knew all too well: the broad smile, the lift of chin, the mischievous eye-twinkle of an entertainer in control.

“Good to see you again, man,” he tells me. “You need to come back out.”

Maybe I will. Maybe I need to. My summer has started. Who doesn’t need a little local Marvin Gaye?

Jeri Rowe is a staff columnist with the News & Record. You can contact him at 373-7374 or at jeri.rowe@news-record.com