I ran into a young woman at lunch the other day who had been a student in one of my journalism classes a year ago. Fortunately, she had made an A, so she seemed genuinely happy to see me.
I asked her a few questions about what she’s up to – she’s interning at a newspaper and planning a beach trip. Then turned the tables on me.
“Are you enjoying your summer off?” she asked.
Summer off? What’s that? Apparently, this bright young woman had forgotten that I only teach part time, that I have a full-time job that keeps me working, well, full time. Unfortunately, unlike many of my teaching colleagues, I don’t get the summer off.
I admit it. I was devastated when I graduated from college and realized that 16 years of having my summers free was ending. Newspapers, it seemed, didn’t allow their reporters to take June, July and August off.
I had a similar feeling when I realized that electricity didn’t just ooze out of the outlets in the house. Georgia Power expects to get paid for the electricity that I use.
I love summers as a kid. I don’t know if kids today have it as lucky as we did. First, so many parents I know want to schedule every minute of their child’s day. Second, because of the crazy nature of our world, kids aren’t always able to roam their neighborhoods like we did.
When I was a kid, summers were spent outside. It’s not that we didn’t have important things to do. We did.
We had forts to build, trails to blaze, baseball to play and fish to catch. And if you didn’t feel like fishing, you could catch tadpoles or turtles and keep them as pets until you got tired of them, at which time you’d set them free again.
This, of course, was in the days before kids could bake their brains playing video games for hours on end on PlayStations and Wiis, back when we had to use your imagination when we played.
We'd hop on our bicycles and ride all over the neighborhood, our bikes becoming fire trucks or Army tanks or spaceships.
I grew up in a neighborhood with lots of kids, and we all spent most of the day outside, chased inside only by the occasional scattered thunderstorm or our mothers’ need for us to help shell peas.
When someone's mother wanted us, she just stepped into the front yard and hollered for us to come.
My friend Andy and I used to ride our bicycles a couple of miles up the road to the Suwannee Swifty store to buy candy and drinks. Suwannee Swifty was the small-town equivalent of the big-city 7-Eleven, which got its name because it stayed open from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m.
We didn’t have 7-Elevens back then. Nothing in Blakely stayed open that late.
We stayed in our forts or on our bikes until it got dark. Then it was time to go home.
But that’s usually when the adults would gather on the front porch and talk about whatever it was adults talked about. The kids would get to run around the yard, playing hike-and-go-seek or Red Rover or whatever.
I really miss those days. I love my job, but I long for those carefree times when the most important thing to worry about was how many turtles I’d catch today.
