School's Out...Almost!

When I was growing up, back in the Dark Ages, we had no central air-conditioning before I turned 12. This meant we spent our summer days in suburbia outside, running like maniacs from early morning until the mosquitoes got too nasty at night. We were the last house on a short dead-end street, the only one for a long time with a pool. The boy next door would rise even before my older brother and I did, and we'd find him waiting outside the back door at seven a.m., his snorkle and inner tube ready for another day in our pool; the other three kids on the street would join us later. We'd eat our lunches outside, sometimes breakfast and dinner too, playing all kinds of games from tackle basketball - don't ask - to kick the can as the sun sank lower on the horizon. None of us went to camp, something I did daydream about based on books I'd read. Ah, those books. In between all the activities and imaginative play of childhood, I'd read: mysteries, The Separate Peace over and over, anything I could get my hands on.

Of course once we got that central air our hours outside diminished. And still later, when I was in high school and then college, there were other entertainments besides running around like a little maniac and other responsibilities, like my summer jobs at Dunkin' Donuts, great source of my infamous white lung disease.

Now I have a seven-year-old daughter and her summers are so different than mine were. Sometime around mid-June she'll start an eight-week adventure day camp. They will run her all day long and it will be wonderful for her - they'll take her to see nearly everything worthwhile there is to see in our small state of Connecticut and some of New York, also taking her swimming nearly every day. And of course, this will be good for me, since my career as a novelist does not allow for a long summer vacation. I need to write; it is what I love and it is how I make my money. But just like I sometimes long for the days before we knew so much about safety - when small kids rode in the front seats of vehicles, having conversations with parents that somehow felt more intimate than those that can be had when one sits in the front seat and the other in the back and no one can see each other's expressions - I can't help but think that all the structure of our new world keeps us entertained and moving, and yet does not allow much room for the quieter pleasures of lying down on the grass next to a good friend, watching the sky move by, lazily turning to that friend, and saying, "Hey, you want to go catch fireflies?"

What were your summers like? And what are your plans after school lets out?

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