Nick Jimenez

Summer days came without schedules

My friend Liz ran down the list of activities she had scheduled for her children during the summer. It was a litany of self-improvement - "camp this" and "camp that," followed by lessons of all sorts. Not a moment to be wasted, you know.
   Her kids are not unlike so many others we all know. That is, to say, the summer cannot be "wasted." Every manner of resume-building, enriching, educational experience must be, well, experienced.
   And what about free time, I asked Liz. "Well, we've got free time scheduled." And then laughed at the irony of that statement.
   Yes, even free time must be scheduled for kids, like tourists on a package tour of Europe ("after a dash through the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles, you will have an afternoon to yourself to explore the rest of Paris. And then on to Brussels.")
   Every kid with a Suburban is scheduled tighter than a presidential candidate 20 points down in the polls. If it's not soccer, it's ballet, or Little League, or computer class, or SAT-preparation courses (at 10 years old, your place in the Harvard class of 2013 is at risk!), or, I kid you not, sewing classes.
   What ever happened to those summers where the only thing you got better at was skipping a rock across a pond?
   I am speaking now of summers when time stretched endlessly ahead, the fall somewhere way over the horizon, a fall that would come only after we had expended the long days of hot afternoons with nights that were full of talk from adults in creaking lawn chairs.
   This is what a kid did during summer then: He went out the door to the yard, to the stoop, to wherever served as the outdoors. And then with nothing more than imagination and whatever he could find to serve as props he occupied the day, until he could heard lunch being called, then followed by supper.
   Now we would say: Why, that provides too much room for trouble. Well, yes, but it also provided room for thinking and pondering and wondering just what made things work. With a little imagination, a mound of dirt in a vacant lot could serve as a backdrop for a continuing assortment of scenarios: a fort, a jumping-off place, a headrest for pondering clouds, a source for aimless digging.
   Yes, there is an element of risk here. When my friend Tommy and I jumped off the roof one afternoon simulating Superman (we had the capes and everything), it was proof that God worries about the big stuff and about boys doing damn-fool stunts.
   The ant-eye view
   Garrison Keillor, the bard of Minnesota and of National Public Radio's Prairie Home Companion, waxes at length about a boy's afternoon spent looking at the world from the perspective of an ant.
   But Keillor's boy knew how to entertain himself, rather than be entertained. Now we are passive people waiting for the show to start. Kids, like ourselves, nurtured in a world of advertisement, must be enticed. We are the constant consumers. Everything must be sold to us, even, as it turns out, salvation.
   Vacation Bible school, that staple of summers, now must come with a "theme" - vegetable themes, Western themes (cowpoke Jesus come to Dodge?). Don't get me wrong. If it works to get the kids in, do it. But whatever happened to, "If you don't go to vacation Bible school, you're going to hell"? How about that for a "theme"?
   Even vacations are not so much vacations as they are Day-Timer exercises. Check off that museum, that historical place, that view, mentally checking them off like chores rather than pleasures. The best visit I ever had to a museum was when I only had one hour to take in the Art Institute of Chicago, so I used the entire time taking in El Greco's "Assumption of the Virgin."
   I still remember those summers when my father, mother and my sister and I would come to Corpus Christi and do nothing but spend the days on North Beach, floating away afternoons on the bay and listening to the water lap at night.
   I spend each summer day trying to capture just a tiny bit of those moments.
  
  
  

 
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