Summertime

Ahh...Summertime in the 70s. On the last day of school you cleaned out your locker (mine always had a bunch of trash and jackets stuffed in the bottom of it) waved bye bye to school and headed off to paradise. Summer stretched out endlessly...three whole months of "no more school, no more books, no more teachers dirty looks". I spent almost all of my summers at the Park Plaza community pool in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I grew up. We'd go there in the morning, come home for lunch, go back to the pool, come home for dinner, go back to the pool, come home and sleep. I can still smell that sharp scent of chlorine and hear the sounds of mid 70s music playing from the speaker at the pool. "Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting" and "Listen to What the Man Says" come to mind. We never wore sunblock (this is back when we had an ozone layer) and would pool our money and go to Git n Go for candy or a Koolie, or possibly even to Braum's for some french fries. The worst part by far was the adult swim. I mean seriously! We would sit right on the edge of the pool, our feet dangling in the water so that at least some part of our body was still in contact with our aqua diety. The adults (all two of them) didn't even look like they were having fun! I mean, they didn't get their hair wet or go on the slide! Every once in a while, some kid would go a little too far trying to stick his feet in the pool and accidentally slip in the water during the adult swim, only to scramble out, half shamed, half hero. When we weren't at the pool, we'd just play games with all of the neighborhhood kids. Capture the Flag, Sardines, anything we could think of. The Helander's house up the street and the Clemensen's house didn't have back yard fences and were right next door to each other, providing the perfect field of play. Sometimes we made up plays or musicals and charged our parents a nickle to come watch us. Lauren's back porch made the best venue for that. We girls also used to camp out in Lauren's back yard in tents. It was always a little creepy for me because they'd zip up the tent and I'd get claustrophobic. But it was fun. We wouldn't come home until past dark. Some kids were called in by a whistle, some were told to come home 'when the streetlights came on'. Another thing I remember is that we never seemed to wear shoes. Oh, we had shoes. We'd go to Kmart at the beginning of summer and buy these Asian looking flip flops, which we called jap-flaps. (Hey, it was the Age of Aquarius, not of Political Correctness) but we rarely even wore those. By the end of summer I think I was an inch taller, just from the thick calluses on the soles of my feet. I could walk on hot asphalt all day! Hell, I could've walked on broken glass! So, here's to Summer! Still my favorite season. Long evenings, green grass and sparkling blue pools. Adult Swim? Bring it on!