Douglas Spaulding Timeline and Summary

Doug's story starts as summer 1928 starts. He's our main character; we'll experience the story of the summer through his experiences, and through other characters' experiences of him.
While picking berries one early summer day, Doug realizes he's alive. He starts keeping an obsessive notebook, recording the important events of his summer for posterity.
Doug realizes with the failure of the Happiness Machine that virtual time travel to anywhere in the world isn't the key to contentment.
Instead, he experiences a truer form of time travel, and therefore, of happiness, in listening to the stories of his elders in his neighborhood.
Too much hanging around with old people has a major drawback for Doug, however: in experiencing their mortality, he is forced to come to terms with his own.
He works himself into such a state of hyperawareness of death that he falls deathly ill. He's not sure what the point of living is when everybody eventually dies.
Doug is saved from his illness by Mr. Jonas, the town junkman, who brings him two bottles of wind from other lands—cooler, calmer ones.
At the end of the book, Doug is cheered by the new beginning of fall, his own robust health, and that of his family. We see summer 1928 end through his eyes as he comes to look forward to the next year and show excitement at the prospect of summer 1929.