What was the best summer of your life so far, and what did you do?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
15 Comments
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
The first thing that popped into my head was the summer I spent at my grandparents house in rural West Virginia. I would have been about nine or ten, and every summer my sister and I would spend two weeks there.
I have very fond memories of being completely free and doing things I could not do at home. My grampa kept ponies and we kids would ride every day, or drape ourselves across their backs as they ate grass in the front yard. I would walk down to the small grocery store down the dirt road every day with a dollar to spend on candy from the old-fashioned glass case, everything from rootbeer barrels to those terrible candy dots stuck to strips of paper.
Grandma wasn’t the greatest cook in the world, but she made the best breakfasts of fresh eggs and the best pork sausage I’ve ever eaten. We”d help do the laundry, pulling her cheap towels out of the wringer washer and hang them on the clothesline until they dried, stiff as cardboard. We’d also have to pick the Junebugs off the clothes. It was a kid’s paradise.
Basically, it was a time before we had any worries about anything other than stepping on a bee or getting poison ivy. We were never bored, we were surrounded by people who loved us and we laughed often. I may have had other good summers since then, but those were truly the best.
Sounds awesome. Much better than spending your summer on the couch watching reruns on the Comedy Channel.
Oh, Booman, I’m so old that I would have been watching the original shows back then! 😉
Sorry, I can’t answer the question. Every time I start thinking of a summer that was special, another one pops into my mind. Just about every summer has had something special about it.
Summer of ’75. No question.
In ’74 I met my wife in Berkely. She left to join the revolution in Portugal. When I’d call sometimes you could hear gunfire in the background.
She came back at the end of summer in ’75.
most of my bests were in autumn.
The tour of Europe with Essex Green in 2001.
The trip to busk in Holland with my yet-to-be bandmates in UncleFucker in 2002.
The national tour with UncleFucker here in the US, 2003
Not that I don’t love summer, but it seems the best times came in Fall.
…and then I became a dad in 2004, and along-distance dad in 2005. Everything since then has been a disappointment by and large. I preferred being a rocker to anything else i’ve ever done.
Summer of 2000, I think. Woke up in the afternoon, played video games until dinner, went out and had fun with friends until midnight, then went off to a night job that was easy, allowed me free internet access and paid me $14 an hour. Repeat for months. Gas was less than $1 a gallon and my college was paid up for several years. And that August, for the first time I had broadband internet access and I got a DMCA violation after only 17 days.
Considering Booman’s recent statements on games and internet, I guess I am an anti-booman.
Probably 1997. I was 20 and halfway through UCSB and had just spent the previous spring quarter stoned and depressed after a bad breakup (and despite living in Isla Vista with a minimal class load!). My brother and his friends had just finished high school, so when I came home to Orange County for the summer (for the last time) I got to be the cool elder sibling who allegedly knew all about parties and girls and bands. I played bass in a retro-blues-surf ’60s band with my brother and his friends, too–we were terrible but it was so much fun. My mother remarried that summer and it was great–everything that my father’s second wedding was not (two years prior).
Another friend and I worked as a cashiers at the local community college bookstore, and I became infatuated with the Colombian girl two years my elder who was our supervisor. For rush week at the beginning of the semester in August my friends and I would work from noon until 8pm, go home to change, go back out to party by 10, stay awake until 2, and then sleep in til 10 am the next morning before doing it all over again. We drove down to Rosarito with the Colombian girl and she drank us all under the table. At the end of summer when my temp job was over she kissed me in the bookstore parking lot.
My big albums at the time were “Being There” by Wilco, “OK Computer” by Radiohead, “All This Useless Beauty” by Elvis Costello, “Peace Beyond Passion” by Meshell Ndegeocello, and “Like Swimming” by Morphine. I was re-reading all of Hunter Thompson’s books up to that point, and felt immortal. I had all my hair and was young, pretty, and stupid. It was glorious.
Summer of ’62, straight out of American Graffiti . I had a black ’51 Merc 4-door ~ James Dean, baby. As you can tell, I’m pretty damn old now;-)
Summer of ’78. I was 18. I always loved road trips. At the time I was going to school in Eugene, Oregon. I drove a friend’s car (via a very indirect route) with all her possessions to her new grad school home in Halifax; met friends there that I drove with to Memphis; hitched to New Orleans; drove a drive-away car one way to Los Angeles & got a final ride up the coast. Eight weeks, made a profit (the drive-aways), circumnavigated the continent, about 10,000 miles. Saw lots of friends, not a care in the world. Road trip to end all road trips (at least on this continent).
I had a couple of band tours later that were like that, only with more responsibilities (i.e., gigs). But that one was best.
That’s pretty tough to answer. As an adult, all of the summers and autumns sort of blur together in my memory. It’s not like when we were kids and had the summer vacations between school years.
I suppose it would have been 1998 (I was 28,) my first trip to Yurp. London-Brussels-Amsterdam-Paris-London, all by awesome high-speed rail. The whole trip was about a month and I was with my best friend at the time. There was a nasty heatwave when we were in Paris and it made me really cranky so I didn’t really enjoy my few days there. I need to give that city another shot sometime.
I learned alot. Mostly about what uptight dicks we Americans can be to each other and the rest of the world. And how much I love those Dutchmen. I’ll just say: We found wonderful hosts wherever we went. Some spoke English, some didn’t but that didn’t matter a bit.
That’s when I became a travel junkie. Speaking of which, my passport recently expired and it’s making me all twitchy. Gotta get that fixed.
Summer of 1994. Following my first year of law school and a nasty divorce. During that prior winter, in the heart of the misery of the fight, I bought myself a ticket to Europe (where I had never been) as a sort of promise to myself that better days were to come. When it came close, I almost didn’t go. Everything at home seemed out of control. I had two children and the custody fight had not really let up even though our divorce case had settled. But my mom said, “No, go. You need to go.”
I had imagined Europe as a kind of Disneyland with beer. It was so much more. It was my first time being young and single and free. Traveled all over the place. In Poland, in the town where my grandmother was born, I met a special girl. We had an amazing love affair. After a week or so, I took her to Paris where we lived out a dream that people have been living as long as there’s been a Paris. For the first time in my life, I felt fully alive.
I tried to recapture that magic in numerous subsequent trips to Europe. Had some fun but it was never again like that. That summer, I felt like I was positively on top of the world.
Without hesitation…
Summer 1980.
Spent it in Marquette, MI on Lake Superior. Took a few summer classes in college. Fell in love with a great lady. Got paid to backpack for more than three weeks while doing research for a professor. Backpacked a lot otherwise. Did not paint houses, which is what I did most summers.
The future looked bright, even if it absolutely wasn’t.
Best summer ever? It had to be the summer of ’69, after my first year of college. I worked as a life guard at a community pool during the day and as a janitor in the community complex where the pool was at night. When I could, I would hook up with my girlfriend, usually going to her house on the south side of Chicago. Sometime, though, I would bring her back to the northern suburbs where I lived. I’m not sure about her but I had my first complete sexual experience with her (dry-humping in high school doesn’t count, does it?) and we were together through all 4 years of college. I did hold off until almost the end of freshman year as I harbored some Victorian “wait until marriage” thing but finally gave in to the demands of raging hormones.
I was fit (played soccer all through college), long-haired in a time when that still drew comments and full of the promises of the future. Indeed, it was the summer humans walked on the moon (as opposed to the previous summer of ’68 that offered up the Chicago Democratic convention and mayor Daley following the violent deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy).
I really felt all things were possible (as long as I kept my 2S deferment and didn’t get drafted and killed in Viet Nam). I had good friends, a great family and knew, I just KNEW the future was bright for me despite the context of world history in which I was immersed. Sigh…