You Can Bring The Tomato Sandwiches on the Canoe
Whatever happened to the lazy days of summer that consisted so simply of canoe rides on the nearest lake, your best friend’s delightful disclosure of little secrets held onto since Fall and tomato sandwiches on the porch? And what became of children spending the entire afternoon scouring neighborhood lawns in search of all manner of insect, mason jar with holes in the lid in tow? Those days, it seems, have made way for a higher-brow sort of summer. I hear all about the trips and experiences of a lifetime but being the sort who is captive to familiar things, I’m not one to give up on a good canoe ride…tried and true. And so, with summer here it makes me wonder. Must I really spend six weeks “summering” in the Hamptons or scaling the North Face to feel like I measure up on the Worthy Summer Scale? Honestly, is it really necessary that I sit, interested for 5 minutes and then bored to the point of suicide for the next 90, hearing about my neighbors excursion to some remote Basque Country location to herd and shear sheep, spin the wool into yarn and then knit 4,000 sweaters for the needy children in nearby villages? Real nice and all but it makes my tomato sandwich excursion come up a little short. It doesn’t help matters that they’ll end the trip with a private audience with the Dalai Lama himself which, incidentally, earns your kid a semesters worth of college credit. You can imagine that my Jerry Garcia look-alike sighting in Golden Gate Park during a free concert just isn’t as impressive. What became of the hypnotic afternoons of well-worn quilts spread about the lawn and strewn with the latest trashy magazines and Tupperware containers filled with strawberries soaked in sugary syrup? No more. Now we’re compelled to head to exotic corners of the world for Tantric Yoga Inner Balancing Retreats. Our heirloom quilts are trumped by 5,000 thread count organic Egyptian cotton spa sheets and our beloved strawberries, now thought too sugary, have been replaced with cucumber infused mineral water. Ohh, sigh, lament, sigh, lament….Is the call of the Great Wall of China that much more commanding than that of the latest from Dan Brown or J.K. Rowlings? Must I endure 17 hours of germ infested strangers on a means of travel fraught with the potential for disaster? The friendly skies seeming less and less friendly. How about the pilgrimage to the hammock in my backyard which holds so little potential for a tragic demise? I suppose with the current thinking my parents would have been considered irresponsible for allowing us to ride our bikes downhill, onto the dock and straight into the lake…no helmets, no life jackets. Our shoes came off the last day of school and didn’t go back on until it resumed in the Fall. Pure, unadulterated reckless abandon. The elixir of life…ours to savor every long and lazy day of summer. Now, not so much. I think the latest hysteria is that you’ll get a terrible, life threatening disease from running around barefoot and if word got out now-a-days that kids are having too much fun some nibby-nosed parent would have it shut down in a matter of minutes. Far better the precious free time of our over-booked youth be packed to capacity with exorbitantly priced camps whose mission to profoundly and permanently enhance the quality of the campers life is proclaimed throughout the land, or at least Piedmont, by all the parents who have deposited their little lovelies there for the last several years. Sigh, lament, sigh, lament again…I suppose old quilts and trashy magazines could lead to lounging, lounging could lead to day-dreaming, daydreaming could lead to creative thought and geez, who knows what the heck that could lead to. So, fare thee well you Piedmont summer folk! Off you go! Adults, to a Sustainable Organic Farming Camp with a Corporate Teambuilding Component and kids….take your pick! Future Quantum Physicists of America Camp, Andre Agassi Tennis Camp, David Beckham Soccer Camp, Trek the Himalayas Camp, African Safari Camp (Yes, in Africa, duh..), Civil War Re-enactment Camp (Yes, you’ll actually shoot people and contract syphilis…c’mon, it’s all part of the experience!), George Lucas Film Production Camp, Stalk and Kill Your Own Bear Camp (the insurance on this one can be a little pricey), Sociological Exploration Camp, Extreme Jet Powered Kite Surfing Camp, Climb Mt. Kilimanjaro Camp (Yes, you actually climb it). Go on! Live the life! Dream the dream! Upon your return I’ll flag down the ice cream truck. I think the prices have gone up but for about $2 we can get a handful of Otter-Pops. We’ll enjoy them in sun…on my blanket. It’ll be fun. Seriously.
