His Take:
Summer! It turns me upside down. Summer, summer, summer. It’s like a merry go round. Yes, those are the opening lines to the classic Cars song “Magic”, but it’s also exactly how I feel about summer. As a little guy, summer was a magical land filled with comic books, candy, Mickey Mouse ice cream bars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, lakes, girls, a lot of kissing….okay, I’m gonna pull the reins back here and for the purpose of this article, I’m gonna focus on the summers of my early years. So like, late 70’s/early 80’s. And if I don’t get dates exactly right, you’ll have to excuse me. I was a kid and as a kid, you don’t really pay attention to dates. Unless you’re a baseball fan. How do those guys keep all that shit straight? Somedays I call my cat by my dogs name. And my dog died 20 years ago.
SO, let’s go back to the late 70’s/early 80’s. It was a golden age. A time when people didn’t lock their doors. You could tell your mom “I’m going into town with Sammy!” at 9AM, not get home until supper time, and you wouldn’t get in trouble. Well, a lot of times you had to call them at some point in the day to let them know what you were doing. It was the birth of the greatest music in the history of music. At the time it was called Soft Rock, that transformed into Adult Contemporary, and that gave birth to Yacht Rock. It was truly a golden age.
When I was a kid, there was SO much to do every summer. The beautiful thing was that you didn’t plan anything. You just got on your bike and went wherever you wanted to. Off into the woods, into town, over to your friends house, ect. One of my very best friends and I would get on our bikes and go all over the damn place. One of our “typical days” were always one of my favorite. He and I were totally into the same stuff. Except for baseball. I wasn’t near as big of a baseball fan as he was. The only team I was interested in was the Brewers. And the San Diego Chicken. And, for some strange reason, I was a big fan of Steve Garvey, ANYWAY, I would ride my bike over to Mike’s house, which was about two blocks away. We would play with his toys a little bit, then decide to ride into town. Now, we lived in Kellner, so that was a bit of a task. But, after about an hour, hour and a half, we were “in town” and the fun could REALLY begin.
We would go up and down 8th street at least twice looking for comics, magazines, toys and other stuff that we wanted. We’d buy comics fro, places like Schneider Drugs and Bob Castle Foods, we’d go hunting for GI Joes at Shopko. A very orange Shopko. One where you’d hear Karen the Shopko lady come over the loudspeaker and tell you about things. Lunch consisted of however many donut holes we could grab at the different grocery stores, accompanied by a bottle of pop and some candy that we got somewhere. Then we’d ride to my Aunt & Uncle’s house on 9th street behind Bowlmore. There, we’d get picked up by either my grandparents, my friend's mom, or if my Aunt needed to get something from my grandparents, she would take us back home.
Those were magical days, and there will be certain times when I come across an old comic and I’ll think “I got this from Daly Drugs. It was right before we went home, and we decided to check one last time, and they had added new stuff to their comic spinner rack! Or I’ll be doing some research for an article and pull up an old wrestling magazine cover from, the 80’s and remember that I got that magazine at Copps.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s not how every summer went. But that was how the best summers went. I hope you have a great summer/ I hope you get to go on vacation somewhere super awesome. Just don’t forget that there are awesome things that you can do that are really simple and will give you great memories. Like bike-riding, reading or sex. There’s also always some great stuff going on at the library. Have a great summer!!
Her Take:
Tonight I feel exactly like I should.
When I finally sink back into the couch at the end of the day, my body is tired. My muscles start to relax and they’re grateful for the rest. I settle back and sigh, because that’s the only right response to feeling this kind of relief, glad for the day, happy that it’s done, ready for sleep.
The smell of campfire mixes with sunblock and mosquito spray to create a distinctive, not entirely unpleasant cocktail and makes me reminisce about the day, even before it’s truly over.
I’m thinking about how days like this, summer days, make a difference to people who live in winter places like Wisconsin. How the heat of the sun and the endless possibilities of longer days set us free and push us out into the world to live in earnest. How the fresh, humid air changes us on a molecular level. Makes us better.
There are places in the world, I know, and some not so far away from here, where the weather gifts the inhabitants with reasonable highs and lows. They own light sweaters and jackets for the winter and tend their gardens in December. They live and love and pass away not knowing what it’s like to wear a winter coat to leave the house and then put on shorts when you get home. (Or, indeed, to think about wearing a winter coat and shorts together.) Make no mistake, I don’t begrudge them their weather. The verdant colors and tropical weather bring dangers with them that I care not to endure: Snakes and alligators, hurricanes and earthquakes.
Our trade-off, then, for enduring winters so cold and snow so thick that they trap us in our homes, make our bodies cramp with the maddening smallness of our surroundings in sub-zero weather, is the summer.
There comes a day each year when our winter clothes get packed away and forgotten, at least for a little while. We dress in linen and shorts or sundresses, wear sunglasses, and let all of the cells in our bodies drink in the warmth of the sun. We move around freely and the long muscles of our legs and arms stretch with gratitude.
Drive through our towns, down our streets, and you’ll see us: on hands and knees in our gardens, working on ladders against houses or trees, running in sprinklers, sitting in lawn chairs with a cold drink in hand, at the park, at the lake, anywhere of the thousand-thousand places that are not inside our houses. Out in the sun.
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