Remembering Summers Past

Just Finished Reading: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Did you ever notice how short the weekend is? I feel a bit like Andy Rooney now. That's the way he'd start one of his segments on 60 Minutes. Still, it's true isn't it? And it doesn't seem to matter how many days you get in a weekend, they always seem so short. I'm just wrapping up a 3-day weekend and it seems like I just left work. Tomorrow I'll be right back in the swing of things for 4 days (which will feel like an eternity) then another weekend. I imagine I'd feel the same way if it was a 4-day weekend too.

The same is true of vacations. I'll finally get some time off in October and that'll be great but I know how it's going to turn out. The first day will be fantastic. I'll have the whole rest of my vacation in front of me. The second day, not as good as the first but still, plenty of time. It'll keep up like that until I hit the middle of the vacation, at which point I'll start to dread the days ahead. 3 days left, then 2, then 1, then back to work again.

I remember when I was a kid it was the same way. Remember summer vacation? Man, that first week was FABULOUS! You had so much free time you didn't know where to START! You'd sit around making all sorts of plans. You'd figure out where you wanted to go, who you wanted to see, what you wanted to do. Of course, by the middle of the vacation you were so bored that a part of you couldn't WAIT to get back to school. And then, of course, came those last few weeks. Oh the horror of those last few weeks of vacation! All that time wasted. So many things you didn't do, people you didn't see, places you didn't go.

Anybody remember those summer reading assignments? Oh what a joke those were. Seriously, did they really expect you to read all that stuff while you were on vacation? Actually, YES they did, as I found out. And they expected you to REMEMBER it too! The worst one I had was The Grapes of Wrath. Hated that book, I really did. Too damn depressing. Certainly NOT the kind of thing you want to spend your summer vacation reading. So what do they do? They not only assign it, they TEST you on it when you get back. About the only thing I remember from Grapes was that Steinbeck spent a whole damn chapter writing about some turtle crossing the road. Don't really remember what happened after that because I totally lost interest and never got past that part.

And summer camp. Remember summer camp? That pretty much fell into two categories. You had the summer camp you never wanted to leave because it was too much fun and you had the summer camp that was pure hell and you figured that a just God would smite the entire staff and deliver you, the poor, suffering campers back to the promise land where there were things like air conditioning and TV.

Man, I know I'm old now. As I was sitting here writing this I remembered one of the things I used to do on my summer vacation. I used to watch a lot of MTV. Ok, nothing odd about that. Kids watch MTV all the time these days right? Sure, but when *I* used to watch, they actually showed MUSIC most of the time!

Ah well. Back to work in the morning. 4 days at the store than another little mini-vacation of 3 days. Sort of like having my summer break in little pieces.

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