This Is the Season for Relaxation : Culture: Learning to do nothing whatsoever takes lots of practice. It helps to have a front porch to sit on or a park nearby for hanging out.

In the lexicon of Madison Avenue, summer and fun go together like sun and surf, pain and gain, sweat and equity. You build a good time with calories, just like you build a good wall with brick.

For starters, you have to go somewhere. The park, the beach, the mountains. That’s what the advertisers would like you to believe. But there is an easier path to contentment.

It’s the delicious art of doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.

You sit. You recline. You take in the shade. You stare into space if you like. You wait, but not in line or at the bus stop. Too much purpose in that. Your goal is to contemplate, meditate.

Though you don’t require a label for your inactivity, we’ll call it repose, that peacefulness admired by philosophers and poets and ascribed to the gods themselves, who, as Lucretius said, enjoyed “immortal aeons and supreme repose.”

You say you can’t relate to the “immortal aeons”? Not even “supreme repose”? You just don’t have that kind of time?

There are plenty who do. You can find them everywhere.

Not those riding bicycles down the street, or the woman pushing the baby stroller or the men playing basketball in the park. For purposes of our inquiry, even watering the lawn--popular with the older set on summer afternoons--is a little too vigorous. Unless you follow the Duward Ladd method.

The 73-year-old retired contractor, resplendent in white golf shirt and hat, does the job not in the standing position, arm extended, thumb on the hose-end, but from an old kitchen chair.

First he positions his sprinkler, a 25-year-old contraption of galvanized pipe. Then he takes a seat under the shade of a maple tree and watches the water soak in.

A monosyllabic sort, the Oklahoma native says, “Yeah,” he’s content to sit there for hours watching the comings and goings of his quiet section of Eustace Street in Pacoima.

“There’s nothing else to do,” he says with no inkling of displeasure. “I worked all my life, then stopped.”

Sometimes, when his wife is away at work, Ladd chauffeurs for a retired doctor. Otherwise, he doesn’t have much on his agenda but dominoes. And TV’s out of the question.

“I’ve always been an outside person,” Ladd says. “I don’t like inside.”

The porch--that prop for public sitting so ubiquitous in the Southern states--seems out of favor with architects today. Consequently, on a sweltering summer day, there is nary a person in sight along miles of residential streets from Burbank to Granada Hills where houses are geared for back-yard living.

But in older neighborhoods of the northeast Valley, the porch is still a common sight. And even a cursory inspection shows that it is still in use.

Having no car, no school, no itinerary for the day, Lorraine Garcia, 16, and Elvira Gutierrez, 19, find themselves sitting out the heat on a shaded porch on Alexander Street in San Fernando.

Their cooking and cleaning are done. Their hope of being picked up by friends to go to the movies is still a far-off prospect for the evening. They may walk down the street to the library later on or go shopping when it cools down. For now, a little breeze buoys their idle conversation, and there is no hurry to do anything.

Visiting is an honest way to steal an idle hour. When construction worker Frank Granillo dropped by his old neighborhood on Daventry Street in Pacoima, his friend Sam Dorris had a couple of chairs waiting at the curb. That was all they needed to entertain themselves for the afternoon, recalling old times, cracking jokes, sipping a brew.

There’s nothing serious up for discussion, and no comment is off limits if it gets a laugh.

For example, on when they take it easy:

“Every chance we get,” says Dorris, 31, who has the time because he doesn’t have a job.

“That’s it,” says his sister who pops out the front door. “Past 15-20 years.”

“Oh, man. Oh, man,” Dorris says, reeling in mock humiliation. “I’ve got to fill out my applications.”

“We could be the next Cheech and Chong,” Granillo says, rolling his chair back with self-satisfaction.

A small wall in Reseda is the only accommodation required by four young men on Corbin Avenue, just north of Sherman Way. Shoulder to shoulder they sit upon it, “waiting until it gets dark,” says ex-Army mechanic David Wagner, the oldest of the clan at 25.

“For our age guys, there’s really not a lot to do but work, go to school,” says Wagner, who attends Pierce College while working as an AT&T; operator.

They like to go to parties, clubs, the beach, video arcades, says Jay Smith, 18, who lives not far away with his girlfriend and 5-month-old baby and is thinking about entering the military.

In spite of their idleness, the guys say they stay out of trouble.

“No criminal activities,” Wagner says.

“We don’t gangbang,” adds Rudy Barela, 19.

“ ‘Cause gangbanging is stupid,” Wagner finishes.

Barela, orphaned when he was 12, has custody of his 16-year-old brother, whose friends sometimes also visit the wall.

“We counsel them,” Barela says. “We have groups that meet here every couple of days. We talk to them. Try to get them off drugs. We ask them why they do it.”

Of all locales, parks are the most productive setting for the pursuit of perfect idleness.

It’s 3:30 at Balboa Lake in Van Nuys, and 30-year-old Rodel Umali, oblivious to the children rolling in the grass, the joggers, the pedal boaters, strikes a pose on his Kawasaki Ninja as Napoleon did when contemplating the Italian campaign.

“I just woke up,” Umali, a lab assistant from Reseda, says. “It’s too hot in the house, so I just went out relaxing. In another two hours, I’ll be ready for work.”

Not far away, Paula Nelson snuggles into her Blazer, finishing up a chapter of Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres.”

There’s method in her restfulness. She’s teaching English this summer. Her class lets out at 12:30, leaving too little time to go home to Santa Clarita before meeting her cheerleading group at 4. So she was lounging under a shade tree reading until she thought her time was up. A check of the clock in her car tells her it’s earlier than she thought.

“I’ve got five minutes,” she says. And that’s way too much time to squander. “I thought I’d read one more chapter.”

There’s no such pressure on Bernard and Sophie Tmur. They lie on lounge chairs 15 feet apart where water gurgles out of the lake over a channel of rock. The come here every day from their apartment in Encino.

“We stay about five, six hours every day,” Bernard Tmur says, stirring from sleep and lifting a straw hat from his face. Their routine is minimal.

“Read and walk, listen to the radio,” he says. “We have lunch, coffee. We have a good time.”

The Tmurs indulged such pastoral pleasures even before they immigrated to the United States in 1963.

“In Argentina, when the kids were young, we used to pack the sandwiches,” he says. “We like the life outdoors.”

Their first stop was Minnesota, where for 13 years they tracked Elysium.

“We used to go to a different lake every week,” says Bernard, a retired engineer.

After arriving in Los Angeles, they found repose at the beach until Balboa Lake opened last summer.

“This place is beautiful,” Sophie Tmur says dreamily.

And so she lies back. Doing nothing.