summer time, and the livin' is...busy

Wasn't summer better when we were kids? School was over, so there was a feeling of accomplishment like, yes! I've finished my freshman year (or whatever!) and something to look forward to Hooray! I'm a senior (or whatever!) and you had several glorious months to do absolutely nothing. 

When I was a kid, the big thing was going to the pool to hang out. I'm not much of a swimmer, personally, but it didn't matter. You had to go. It was the Thing to Do. Everyone at our grade school/junior high school ended up at Harrer Pool in the summer - we even wrote about it in our yearbooks "See you at the pool. Hope you get some guys! XOXO!"  We all wrote the "hope you get some guys" bit, too. Not that we would have known what to do with the guys once we "got" them. 

So we'd go to the pool. We'd have the ritual of buying a new swim suit at the beginning of the season, we'd fill up little plastic beach bags with toys and towels and sunscreen. We'd swim and splash around and play and go down the water slide, until they blew the whistle for Safety Break. All the kids had to get out of the pool for 15 minutes or something, and that's when the adults would swim, and the life guards would change shifts (maybe? I'm not entirely clear about the mechanics of Safety Break, because I was out of the pool, see?). I'd go with my friends to the concessions stand and we'd get chocolate chip cookies warm out of the oven (or microwave maybe? I don't know that there'd be an oven, but the cookies were always warm) and an ice cold cherry coke. 

Looking back, it seems like the perfect time. We didn't care about the economy, or global warming (90 degree weather just meant it was perfect pool weather, duh!) or terrorism, or who was president, or the price of gas, or the unemployment rate or any of those things. It was the summer time.

Now that I'm OLD I have to worry about that stuff. I have a job, and I spend my days, 90 degrees or otherwise, in the (nice, cold) office. There is never any time to do absolutely nothing, not like there was then. Even if you take vacation, it is not as strings-free as it used to be. You make plans, you worry about your flight, if you're me, you worry about bedbugs in the hotel, getting lost, getting mugged, spending too much money.

I have not been to our local pool in years and years. I think I stopped going once we hit high school. Every so often I think about going back there and doing something I was not allowed to do back in the day - swim during Safety Break, obviously.