How I Spent My Summer Vacations

I had some very, very good summers as a kid. My parents put in a pool the year I was nine—nothing fancy, just a 24-foot circle of clear blue water that sat in the backyard—so from that time on my sister and I would wake up, put on bathing suits, do whatever chores were required of us, and head for the pool. I can’t count the number of hours we spent playing games, choreographing elaborate water performances, perfecting back flips off the deck, and making whirlpools. As long as there was an adult around to make sure no one drowned, we were never, ever bored.

We only ever went into the house to eat and to watch The Price is Right. My mother complained about having wet towels everywhere, and of water tracked in a trail to the bathroom, but she loved the pool as much as we did. My dad, on the other hand, saw it as a waste of water and money, and rarely ever got in it. His loss, I say.

I developed my love for poolside reading at an early age. I read floating on rafts. I read walking around in the center of an inner tube, with my booked propped on the edge, resolutely avoiding splashes. I read on the pool deck with my feet in the water, or standing in the water with my book on the deck. Sometimes, when it was chilly, I’d go out to the driveway, make sure the car’s windows were up, and read on the backseat until I got too hot to breathe, then I’d run for the relief of the cold pool water.

It’s an understatement to say my sister and I were very tan—we’re of Slavic and Italian peasant stock, and were seemingly meant to absorb sunshine with never a burn and rarely a freckle. Sunscreen was unheard of in our corner of the world, although we were happy to slather ourselves with Ban de Soliel (for that St. Tropez tan, of course). My sister tanned to a deep gold, but I turned brown, brown, brown. Like a nut. Like a bean. Like I will never do again, because I’m afraid of looking like a baseball glove. (Happily, though, our mom was super-tan then too, and she has great skin now. Let’s hope we follow in her footsteps.)

The summers weren’t all pool, of course. We played girls’ softball, and endless games of softball in the yard with neighbors (and ghost runners), and I forced my sister and the two younger neighbor kids to play school with me when we were all pretty little. (I loved playing school, and spent a full winter making up standardized tests [complete with instructions, bubbles to fill in, and an answer key] on reams of graph paper, in anticipation of playing school the following summer. My sister and her friends were not pleased, to say the least, but I made them take the tests. Because I was the eldest, and the biggest. So there!)

There was a Presbyterian church up the road from us, and one summer the mothers got it into their heads that they were sick of us (this was pre-pool) and decided to stick us all into the church’s Vacation Bible School. I have to say that our small group of Catholic school kids was flummoxed by some of the songs we sang, like the one about how we had the joy, joy, joy, joy down in our hearts, and that if the devil didn’t like it he could sit on a tack. What? Sit on a tack! WHAT? Sit on a tack. I remember all of us looking like we thought that should NOT have been going on in church. I also remember making a tiny wishing well out of an empty baby food jar, disassembled wooden/spring clothes pins, and popsicle sticks. The experience wasn’t unpleasant, but I remember being relieved to be done with “those Christian people”.

Anyway, the only thing that I really longed for over my long kid summers was to be able to take classes (or even just one class) at the community college. I wanted to take a foreign language, creative writing, or a science or math class, and I BEGGED, but my mother would never go for it because her work schedule varied too much to be able to commit to getting me there and back. Plus, I think she was suspicious about my wanting to go to school in the summer. She was certainly suspicious (at the same time she was sort of proud) of all my reading. There was lots of, “Get your head out of that book and go play.” I loved going out and playing, but I loved being a Smart Kid™ too, and I really, really wanted to be smarter.

I guess it didn’t matter. When I finally got old enough to drive myself to the community college, I got busy with boys and jobs and cheerleading practice, and lovely trashy novels, and I let the idea of summer classes go. In fact, I would have been embarrassed about taking any kind of school in the summer by then—I still liked being smart, but it seemed much, much more important to figure out how to be cool.

But still. Maybe I’d have known better if they’d have let me take those classes.