It’s July 25th and you know what that means: you already see Back to School sales at the mall. Yes, summer is almost over and we will soon be on to fall with cooler weather, changing leaves, college football and that nagging feeling that another summer has been wasted. In fact, I’m still trying to figure out when summer began because I think Memorial Day was like a week ago. For all I know next week I am going to have to shovel the driveway.
That is one of those things that bugs me. When you are ten summer lasts a good three years. Once school ends it feels like you have an eternity on your own before you have to go back. Now summer lasts roughly three days and I never seem to actually take a vacation during the summer. So I thought that I would look back and list the things I miss about summer now that I am no longer a kid.
1) Watching game shows: The sole purpose of waking up in the morning in summer was to watch game shows. It was great that I grew up during the golden age where I could watch Wheel of Fortune when they had to buy their prizes, Sale of the Century, The Price is Right with the only true host Bob Barker and of course the king of all game shows Press Your Luck. This was a good three hours of my life every morning. Not only do I no longer get to do this (well, except for the days when our work television is mistakenly kept on a certain channel) but the only game show on in the morning is Deal or No Deal, otherwise known as the “Random Number and Expected Value Hour”. I really miss this.
2) Summer Reading Programs at the Library: This was always fun. You’d sign up and would have to read so many books over the summer and then you would receive something though all I remember is seeing my name on the wall. Also, collections of Peanuts cartoons did not count as books. I am more upset about this now than I was as a kid. There was probably deeper meaning in those cartoons than in half the stuff I actually read. Well, other than my Encyclopedia Brown books. Those things were like Tolstoy to my ten year old mind.
3) Wiffle ball competitions in the front yard: To be honest, I should probably include all of the sports that I played with my three brothers, primarily my younger brother but occasionally all four of us. This included wiffle ball (hitting the ball on the roof is a home run, over the roof means a mad scramble to see if we could find the ball, and a yard setup that made it impossible to hit to right field), alley basketball (the garage being considered in bounds and perfectly valid to drive your opponent into it), catch off the roof (take a tennis ball, throw it on the slanted roof of our two story house, watch it bounce a few times and try to catch it as it falls) and nerf basketball (where anything short of sending your opponent into the window was legal.) Exactly how my parents dealt with having four boys who felt that the entire house was one big sporting arena is beyond. Especially when one of my brothers turned our backyard into a one hole golf course featuring a dogleg.
4) The illicit thrill of staying up late to watch The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson: As I was growing up occasionally I would find myself in a room with a TV set. Typically this meant that I was rooming with one of my older brothers and therefore had no rights in determining what to watch and at what time. But occasionally they would go off to camp or stay over at a friend’s house and that meant that the TV was all mine. The fact that it was in black and white was no matter. This meant that I could enjoy all of those things that adults got to watch like Johnny Carson, MASH reruns and, gasp, the Benny Hill show. It still amazes me that in my youth watching Benny Hill was enough to get people to imply that you were going to hell whereas now any kid with an internet connection can watch midget porn twenty four hours a day.
5) The candy bars sold as Little League Fundraisers: Ok, I must make a confession here: I never played little league baseball. Maybe that explains a lot, I don’t know. Given that I was never an athlete and I was always a little off socially my parents decided that it would be best if I didn’t play and to be honest I never argued against them. I liked basketball better and would rather shoot in the alley than play baseball. But all of my brothers did play and that meant that summer meant baseball candy. It was always of a quality a level or two less than what you would find at the store but there was just something to it that made it worthwhile. Maybe it was just the fact that it was summer and you had a chocolate bar next to your bed. Something made it totally awesome.
6) Listening to neighbors’ summer parties: The neighbors across the alley from us had an above ground pool. This was an amazing thing when they put it in because absolutely no one in the neighborhood had one. I usually slept in the bedroom that faced the alley and that meant that in summer I could sleep with the windows open and hear the party going on across the way. It was like having a brief intro into what fun is like when you are an adult and / or could afford an above ground pool.
Sometimes I really do wish that I could go back and be a kid again. I don’t think that I would want to be a kid in today’s world (the 80’s might have sucked in a lot of ways but they were a great time to grow up) but I think it would be nice to get that youthful innocent exuberance back. Or at least to spend one summer night running out in the yard catching fireflies and not giving a damn about anything else in the world.
Best of 120 Minutes: The more I learn about the music business and the farther away we get from the grunge era the more amazing it is that Tori Amos became a huge star. Little Earthquakes was released at the same time as Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten and it may have as much of a say in the death of hair metal as grunge did. Think about it: at a time when most bands were a bunch of guys with big hair, tight spandex pants and lyrics that essentially consisted of “Ooh yeah baby come on tonight” here was this girl with a piano and songs that were just so brutally honest and open that they were almost frightening to listen to. I still can’t recall having heard anything like Tori before she hit the scene. She has ended up with this reputation of a successful, if a bit spacey, artist. I think the word groundbreaking should be used a lot more often.
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