The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
The return of the old-fashioned summertime
I sometimes think about the long summer days when I was growing up. Like many of my fellow Gen-Xers, I can remember weeks of completely unsupervised play, where my sister and I would come home for lunch and dinner before rushing back outside, ending the day only after the streetlights came on. These memories are mostly reliable, though definitely painted heavily with nostalgia’s brush; I try to forget the brutally hot San Joaquin Valley summers, for example.
This type of summer memory is often trotted out to complain about over-scheduled kids today, who rush from one heavily supervised activity to another without time to be kids. This summer, though, we are all experiencing the enforced return of the good old 1970s and 1980s style summer vacations, with so many places still either on quarantine lockdown or with socially distanced features.
The reviews of The Return of the Old Fashioned Summer are mixed. My Facebook feed shows parents singing the praises of no more driving to summer camps before veering suddenly to plot ways to hide from their children. The paint of nostalgia has worn thin, and we suddenly remember that there were plenty of times our perfect summers were not quite perfect, as we complained bitterly to our own parents about how bored we were, and how it’s too hot to play outside, and how Tim’s parents were putting a pool in their backyard, and did we mention that we’re really, really bored?
Fortunately, our summer has been relatively calm. My wife and I have always tried to keep our son’s activities limited to give him time for free play, so the curtailment of many organized summer programs has not hit us as hard as it could have.
My son spends a lot of his day playing with his dinosaurs, or our dog, or his parakeet. When he tires of this, he reads. He has discovered the joys of Captain Underpants and Dog Man books, and he seems to have a deep enough knowledge of both book series to fill a Ph.D. dissertation. For those of you without access to an elementaryschool child, these books appeal very strongly to the mind of a 7-year-old, which is to say they are silly and scatological and very clever. My son loves their goofiness, and, when he learned that some of the books’ titles are parodies of classics (e.g. “A Tale of Two Kitties”), he enlisted his mom and me in his mission to create hundreds more titles for the series, should Dav Pilkey ever find himself running short of ideas. I have to admit some pride in my contribution to this: “Infinite Pest.”
Despite the long, idyllic days filled with fun and anarchic underpants-wearing superheroes, cracks are beginning to show in the façade. As I was doing work outside yesterday, I asked my son how he likes all the free time to play that he has had this summer. It’s OK, he admitted, but he also wants to be able to go places. Our trips to some of his favorite spots — the Museum of Natural History and the Empire State Building — have been placed on indefinite hold for now.
We have all heard much talk about the need to get back to normal, to go back to the way things were in the years BC — before coronavirus. But, much like our nostalgia for summer fun that wasn’t as fun as we thought, our BC nostalgia for “normal” is longing for a myth. What we should do is use this weird time to think about what worked and what didn’t and set out to create a new normal.