Nostalgia reigns at least once every summer for me.  How about you?

Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit.  A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.

— Ada Louise Huxtable

Do you remember a time when you felt the WHOLE SUMMER stretching out before you?  Remember that joyous walk home on the last day of school when you wanted to shout: SCHOOL’S OUT FOR THE SUMMER – YAY!

For me, summer was a time of possibilities tangled up with long boring days of “nothing to do”… until my Mom would throw up her hands and put all us kids to work!  I know now that summer is a mixed blessing for parents… it’s a more relaxed time with moments of fun interspersed with lifetimes of being chief Kool-Aid maker, bottle-washer, daycare arranger and on-call-chauffer.  And if Mom has an 8-5 job outside as well as inside the home, well then, the late Erma Bombeck says it all in a nutshell:

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

Wise woman that she was, Erma also said:

When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he’s doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911.

Yeah, there was surely some of that going ’round even if my Mom didn’t hold down a “real job”!  (How quickly we forget our stay-at-home-Moms’ efforts!  And, BTW Ellie, your Mom ran a home-based, two-person insurance agency in her “spare” time!)

I Remember the Good Old Days

Summer was a time of lemonade stands and ice cream trucks and orange popsicles and going to the public swimming pool for the day, and the beach on Saturdays and tennis lessons on Tuesday and Thursday mornings over at the Junior High School.

It was a time of walking a mile or two to most places we wanted to go; or taking the bus.  Or if you got really lucky, either riding your bike OR having Mom pick you up when you were done.  I remember – oh boy, am I dating myself now – when pay phones went from a nickel to a dime in the early ‘50’s…  I remember it vividly because on that particular day I’d just sweated through a tennis lesson, trudged over to Webster’s Soda Fountain and indulged myself in a well-earned, creamy-cold, root beer float… and then I tried to call my Mom for the promised ride home only to discover that I no longer had enough coin to complete the call. The price had gone up when I wasn’t looking.  (Isn’t that the story of our lives???)

It was a long walk home.  All up hill, naturally.

I remember going to the local library and checking out a huge stack of books to indulge my reading habit… Playing in the sprinklers and/or the blowup pool on a HOT summer afternoon… Hide and Go Seek in the twilight evenings.  Climbing trees and hanging out.  Walking down to the local grammar school, playing on the swings and monkey bars, going across the street to the little cottage that housed a penny candy store… my goodness, what a wealth of penny candy we could buy… A dime went a long way in those days.

The other day I was browsing in an antique/boutique store with a couple of high school buddies – yes that would make us old friends in every sense of the word – and the old-time candy case reminded me of my childhood jaunts to the grammar school/candy store.  The boutique proprietor tells me that kids still buy a passel of candy but these days they do it with a $10 bill NOT a dime!

I remember sleeping out in the backyard and counting shooting stars… twilight dinners on the patio my Dad built with the San Gabriel Mountains as a backdrop… and sweet iced tea garnished with mint leaves my Mom grew in the garden next to the back stoop.  I remember bike-hikes and mountain climbs and picnics in the park – all alone or with one or two other friends.  Movie matinees in the afternoon and drive-in movies at night.  Iced cold Coke from the bottle… bought from funny coolers filled with ice cold water that froze your hand.  Snow cones and cotton candy at the church carnivals.

Ah, the innocence and the forever-ness of the summers of my youth… Ah yes indeed, those were the good ol’ days…

Nostalgia reigns at least once every summer for me.  How about you?