Tag Archives: summertime rewind

Family matters

Confessions of a Hall Boy done good

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Today’s Summertime Rewind guest writer is a close friend of the Butterscotch Sundae family. Rockford and I went to high school with Don, and now he and his family live less than 2 miles from us. Don is in a lot of our summer memories, but none of them involve quite as much cole slaw, grease and debauchery as the story you’re about to read.

It all started the day I decided to begin work during the summer of 1990 at the age of 13. It was a tough decision in June of that year. It also violated child labor laws.

You see, my friend James and his family had tickets to see an Atlanta Braves / San Diego Padres game in Atlanta. Me? I decided to skip the game and begin work at a restaurant in North Georgia. Getting paid cash under the table was not something I was familiar with, but it spent. And that was more important than baseball at the time, even though the Cubs were coming off a division championship.

I was the restaurant’s official Hall Boy — which I assumed at the time was some rite of passage that would pay dividends in the form of lots of chicks, a Grand Prix with a built-in CD player and subwoofer, a pair of Oakley’s and a Starter jacket, and enough cash to buy all the baseball cards and Grateful Dead bootlegs I wanted from the nearby Flea Market.

I wore a black Mark Grace t-shirt and a pair of jeans to work that first day. They were ruined.
Continue reading Confessions of a Hall Boy done good →

On the Road

A Midwestern family shakes it up with stingrays, sharks and outdoor showers

Today’s Summertime Rewind is brought to us by guest writer Andrea. I met Andrea when I worked at a newspaper in Missouri. We were on the copy editing staff together, which is absolutely as wild and adventurous as it sounds.

Andrea is a trivia buff who enjoys raw radishes; throws wacky, themed parties; runs for fun; and compiles the most all-encompassing yearly family report I’ve ever seen. (Seriously. It’s one of the highlights of my Christmas card season.) She lives in Missouri with her husband Jake and their baby Finn.

My family was a Branson family. By this I mean that we vacationed in Branson, Mo., every year. Sometimes more than once a year, in fact. If you’ve never been to Branson, it might help to think of it as Nashville for old people. (At least that’s how it seemed from approximately 1988 to 1999. I hear it’s changed a lot since then.) And if you don’t even know what Branson is, it’s a touristy city in southern Missouri that’s a big draw to country music fans. And old people.

I’m not trying to offend any Branson fans. In fact, until I reached the why-would-I-spend-any-more-time-with-my-family-than-I-have-to phase in my teenage years, I enjoyed our Branson trips tremendously. Couldn’t wait to go; didn’t want to come home. I have so many wonderful family memories from those trips.

But one of my best childhood memories is the first real vacation we took to somewhere other than Branson. When I was 10, my mom, my younger sister and I drove to Sanibel Island, Fla., with another mother and her daughter –- our good friends. My dad had to stay home to work. (Note that last sentence. It will come into play later.)

It was amazing! It was my first time seeing the ocean (actually it was the Gulf of Mexico, but we Midwesterners don’t understand that distinction), my first time finding seashells on the beach, my first time fearing (and hoping) I might see a shark.

Andrea at Disney World
Andrea at Disney World
We stayed in a house –- owned by our fellow traveler’s dad –- and there was a pool in the back, so when we weren’t swimming in the ocean (ahem, the Gulf), we were swimming in the pool. We rode rusty old bikes all around the island. We looked for alligators (that sounds crazy in writing) and actually saw some. We saw dolphins too. All these things were so different from my usual vacationing activities.

Here are a few more of the many highlights of my Florida trip:

  • The house we stayed in had an outdoor shower. This blew my 10-year-old mind.
  • Sanibel Island is known for having lots of sting rays. Therefore, people do what’s called the “Sanibel shuffle” while they’re entering or otherwise walking around in the water. Basically it means you shuffle your feet in the sand to scare the sting rays away rather than stepping on one. And, boy, is it fun.
  • Remember how my dad had to stay home to work? Well, my mom informed me one day that we would be going to the airport to watch the planes take off and land. I’d never been on a plane, so I thought this sounded like a fantastic idea. If I were older and wiser, I would have thought it was a ridiculous idea. Anyhow, after one plane landed, my mom said we should watch the people who were exiting the plane. Lo and behold, my dad stepped off the plane! I don’t think I had been that surprised in my entire decade of life.
  • I loved playing in the waves, particularly jumping around and diving under them. I did this over and over and over again. Keep in mind that this was in about 3 feet of water. I guess I got complacent because I forgot not to dive straight down. Consequently, I slammed my face into the sand and ended up with scrapes and sores on my forehead, nose and chin. I just realized I probably shouldn’t have included this in the highlights list. Oh, well.

    With my scraped-up face and all, our trip to Florida opened my eyes to the wider world. And that’s a good thing for anyone.

    • Family matters

    My dad’s summer with the Boy Scouts

    Today’s Summertime Rewind guest writer is more of a guest speaker, because it’s the only way I could get my dad to share a summertime story with us. I dragged this one out of him while he made potstickers to go with our leftovers from Forbidden City last week.

    “You could write about riding the bus all over town,” I suggest. My grandma was a city bus driver, and my dad and his siblings used her passes to traverse the town.

    Dad doesn’t like that idea, though.

    “That’s the highlight of my childhood?” he says. “Riding the bus?”

    “It doesn’t have to be a highlight,” I say. “Just a memory. What about the time you hitchhiked to Florida?”

    “That was Easter.”

    “Didn’t you do anything during the summer?”

    And then the big reveal: “I broke my leg one summer.”

    “That’s a good story!” I say. And one I don’t think I’ve heard before.

    “That’s not a good story,” he protests.

    “But it’s a story,” I tell him, and he finally agrees to share it.

    “I was in the Boy Scouts,” he says. “The Boy Scouts was a traumatic experience. I was a Boy Scout for one summer. Maybe a year. In the wintertime I went on a ‘polar bear’ …”

    “What’s a ‘polar bear’?” I ask.

    “I slept outside in the winter in a tent,” he says. “And then in the summertime we went on a canoe trip and I spent the rest of eternity selling cookies and working at pancake suppers and trying to raise money to go to camp for two weeks. And the week before I went to camp? I broke my leg riding my bicycle down the soapbox derby hill. So I couldn’t go to camp. And I spent my summer in a cast.”

    “That’s a sad story,” I say.

    “They’re all sad stories,” he says.

    And then we sit down to a dinner of leftovers, pot stickers and corn nuggets. Which is a strange combination but not a sad story at all.