Summer Broke

“I don’t know, what do you want to do?”

“I can hold my breath longer than you.”

“I can stare longer without blinking.”

And so went our summers when we were kids. We didn’t think we could stand another day of school. You would have thought we were getting out of the state pen to go on a cruise boat with roller coasters and endless cotton candy. 

And then this is what we ended up doing. We thought we had to plan our own summers, and it turns out we were really bad planners. The failures included my cousin Deana’s idea to see if Corningware was truly unbreakable, my own effort to make an elevator from a rope and then testing it on a two story building, and my neighbors’ (Catherine and Chris) idea to use umbrellas to fly off the roof like Mary Poppins. Let’s don’t even go into pulling a plank up from the 2nd floor so we could talk to the person below. Why were we surprised this ended in a broken nose?

I guess this is why, by the time we got to be adults, the parents started doing the planning for the kids, which seems a little unfair. I mean, what kind of fun is a grown-up going to dream up? Everyone sit in a circle and rest? Let’s compare shoes and see which one has the best arch support? Let’s go shopping for hours for something you can’t even play with?

There’s a disconnect there. At some point, a few ingenious parents must have gathered in a conference room and come up with the idea to use summer weeks to actually do something productive for their kids’ mind and health. This was also unfair since that was supposed to be the thrust of the other 180 days you had no choice about. 

It started out innocent enough. There were specific things - enjoyable things - you could learn to do better, like swim or play tennis. Kids didn’t really like the word “lessons” for this activity because that brought images of piano practice at best, and math drills at worst. That’s when the parents began to use a code word with each other. It was kind of like when we used to spell things before our kids were old enough to decipher it. Like, you know, “I’m going to put some M-A-R-S-H-M-A-L-L-O-W-S in my L-A-T-T-E, so if you could get her to look at your P-H-O-N-E so I can get A-W-A-Y with it, I’d appreciate it.” This only took us about five times as long to communicate than if we had used regular unspelled sentences. And it only worked twenty percent of the time because forty percent of the time, the kids figured out what we were spelling and the other forty percent of the time, the other adult could not. 

So then we graduated to code language. You know, like can you pass me the confectionary geometric shapes (marshmallows) under the thing you learn multiplication on in third grade (table) so I can put it in my brown, uh, juice (latte)?

So anyway, when it came to coercing kids to continue to learn in summer months, they changed the word “lessons” to “camp.” CAMP? I can hardly believe the kids fell for it. Camp is the thing where you have tents and fall in the lake and make silhouettes of three-legged dogs with your flashlight at night. 

There could be nothing further from camp than these places. We took our kids to air-conditioned buildings to learn more about activities that pique their interest and burn their summers. It turns out there are all kinds of camps that have nothing whatsoever to do with s’mores or wasps or hiking to the bathhouse in the middle of the night. 

You can send your kid to camp at 9 o’clock, but you gotta pick him up by 2:30, so don’t even buy the tent. There’s golf camp, violin camp, science camp, Lego camp, sewing camp, cooking camp, painting camp, pottery camp, cosmetology camp, juggling camp, and Greek mythology camp. If you can spell it, you can camp it.

One of my daughters came home with a brochure about drama camp. Are you kidding me? I had two humans with female hormones going every direction but toward the bed already. I was living drama camp every day of my life. I wasn’t going to pay American currency for them to learn how to do more of it. 

Once our kids were gone to one of these places for a few hours, our wallets were thinner but our house was quieter. I looked at him and said, “What do you want to do?”

We could plant a garden or break out a board game or cuddle on the couch with a movie classic, but those all required choices and a decision.

Hmmm.

“I bet I can stare longer without blinking.”

“I bet I can hold my breath longer.”