Non-Fiction: Summer Long Gone
Another year of education done with. Even the stubbornest Maine snowbank vanished into thin air weeks ago, and although spring has been short the weather is fantastic now. As students struggle up and down the stairs with their belongings, emptying out the rooms they’ve called home for months, summer is finally beginning.
But it’s not really the same, is it? Summer’s just another busy part of the year now, usually starting with job searches. Some take extra courses over those three months, some travel, some are even doing internships for their majors. The rest of us, most of us, knuckle down to those job searches and try to find a way to scrounge money together for the next school year, always with an eye on the spare change you’ll be able to use for yourself instead of overpriced textbooks.
Remember the summers when you did nothing, and yet still managed to do so many different things. Camping, biking, visiting theme parks, swimming at the beach, just hanging out with friends and being quite possibly the laziest living being ever. No job, no extra courses, no internships, not a single thing. Summer was your time, when you could do what you wanted. Three whole months to unwind from the school year, and if you had summer reading it got done the last week before school started so that it didn’t interfere with your good time.
The parking lot back in Malden, when I was just a little kid, turned into a war zone each summer. Nobody, kid or adult, could cross that stretch of pavement without getting caught in the crossfire of half a dozen water guns. Water balloons exploded everywhere, creating any dash for cover into a gauntlet. And when we really needed to lay on the watery hurt we hauled out the buckets and snuck up on one another, doing our best impressions of football players dousing their coach after a game.
When’s the last time anybody my age, in college, had a water fight like that? I don’t mean chasing each other around with little two dollar water guns for half an hour, I mean an H2O-filled brawl, the kind where thirty friends are duking it out for hours until they’re completely soaked, mother-starts-talking-about-catching-your-death-of-pneumonia soaked. More than a decade ago for most of us, I’d bet. It’s another casualty in the list of things lost along with the summers of years past, the lazy summers that have succumbed to this disease called ‘growing-up’.
Well, I’m going to see if I can do something about that. Buy the biggest water gun money can buy maybe, invest in a few bags of water balloons. I’ve got a funny feeling I can wrangle up a gang and a car and make a few visits here and there. If not? Three words: lightsaber bike jousting. I may have another busy summer ahead of me, but I think I can manage to act like a kid again for a little while, right?
