Summers

Please don't think of me as a young girl who was just mean to boys, even though that is probably accurate...
Someone asked, "How did you spend your summers as a kid?" Here's what I came up with, without writing an *entire* novel. I could really go on and on.

I grew up in Iowa. When I was young, I spent summers at various day camps, YMCA, Camp Fire, the office where my mom worked. We had swimming lessons at the high school pool (aka, the munici-pool), where I thought I would never be old enough to go. We had to swim two laps in order to have permission to swim in the deep end, although this was never recorded and barely monitored, so it's a wonder we still did it. My husband refers to Iowans as Whos, as in Dr. Seuss. I suppose actually taking the test under such loose rules was something the Whos would do. Older girls laid out in the sun, rubbing baby oil on their pale, peachy skin, taking extra care not to get their giant, carefully disorganized hair wet. Our counselors were college girls, although in my memory, they seem about 40. One summer we spent a good part inside (flood rains outside) building the biggest card house we could. The extreme humidity certainly helped in that matter. Note: old cards work best. That was the summer Tony made patches for his secret club, and I was only allowed in after a dog bit my head and I had to get rabies shots. That was also the summer Nova brought in an already scratched off losing lottery ticket and kept using the silver crayon to color it over and have people scratch it off again and again. I'm afraid that was the cleverest thing she ever did.

As I got older, I rode my bike back and forth from day camp. I was usually the oldest person there, although there were, some days, one or two others my age. When I was 11, at the Camp Fire day camp, I had a counselor who was a former employee of my father's, way back when he worked in the jewelry department at JC Penney. She told me this horror story of working at the jewelry counter, how she had fallen off her bike and had a scab about 2 inches wide and 4 inches long. That's not the bad part. The bad part is when she said a boy of about 9 came in, looking for something for his mother, and he picked her scab! He ripped it right off her arm, and she, bleeding and horrified, grabbed it from him just as he was about to put it in his mouth.

I was about 12 when my parents let me stay home by myself. That was when I discovered the Young and the Restless. I only watched it in the summers, and when I got sick, and on spring break, and over the winter break (we still called it Christmas break then) and still managed to keep up. Actually, I saw it a couple of times about 10 years after this, and was still in the know. This was the summer of Cricket and Danny and Nina. Danny (I don't know the actor's name-wait-Michael Damien! Thanks Wikipedia!) came out with a hit single in real life, "Rock On," a remake of the original by I don't know who. It was awful, but he was so cute that I watched it on MTV. That was also the summer we got MTV. My friend Irish came over often, and we would listen to KCCQ, the local radio station. We were playing Monopoly one day and Brian Adams' Summer of '69 came on. I never liked that song, and I'm sure Irish never did either, but we jumped up and started singing at the top of our lungs and dancing the wild dance that only 13 year olds know.

Irish and I avoided the nearest outdoor pool, and the high school pool at that point. Far too many popular and rich kids. We rode our bikes all the way out to the old country club to swim. And we went almost every single day. I had a white Speedo racing suit with different colored flags up one side because I was modest, and Irish had a neon green Body Glove bikini because she was not. There was a boy there who collected our dollars as we came in and never really spoke to us. My brother was a lifeguard and so knew all the employees of all the pools. He told me this boy was Matt Zbracki and was a senior at the high school, and was most unpopular and hated, even though he was always nice to us. One day, he gave me a marigold plucked from the landscaping as we came in, and I was so confused. Remembering what my brother had told me, I cruelly flushed the flower down the toilet. Later in the summer, at the "popular" outdoor pool, I ran into Matt who offered me a ride home. I had my bike and so I said, "I have a ride." He replied, "Your loss." I still feel sorry for him, trying to date an 8th grader.

My family spent a lot of time riding our bikes around town and the state, really. And like all other Iowans, and probably most Americans, eating fresh corn and tomatoes and grilling giant pork chops. I'm sure my memory of it is idealized, but when I think of individual moments, the cicada noise, the train whistles coming in through my open window as I sweltered all night (no air conditioning allowed until it was 90 degrees for 3 days in a row), fireflies (we called them lightning bugs) in a jar with some grass so they would have something to eat, they are the pockets of sweetness that I cling to. It was not exactly Norman Rockwell, but we did what we could to get it as close as possible.