What They Don't Tell You

When you’re young, they don’t tell you what’s going to be important to you in the future. They don’t say, “Keep your rock polishing kit, kid, because when you’re forty-seven, you’ll wish you hadn’t sold it for a quarter at a tag sale.” They don’t say, “You know that gaggle of misfits who you hung out with every day of summer, you’ll never have friends like that again.” And they don’t say, “Enjoy your summers, every second of your summers, because at some point, summer is just a word. It’s no longer a feeling. It’s no longer a sensation.”

Maybe because it’s too sad. Or maybe because for some people, that’s just not true.

Perhaps, there are folks who live through their childhoods, and they contain them in little boxes with sachets from their grandmas, then stand on a step stool to tuck them high up at the back of their closets. Their memories always smell like dried rose petals and mothballs. Or maybe some people’s childhoods were bleak, and everything after 18 feels different, like being rescued from a circus as an old elephant and released to spend the next five years in bliss in a sanctuary.

But for me, there was a perfect summer. We were a motley crew of kids, and we would meet at the snack bar by the community swimming pool. Even though none of us had jobs yet, somehow we always had a pocketful of change to dump out on a chipped and faded picnic table. A table adorned with initials cut using pocket knives by youth who had come before us.We would buy 25 cent ropes of licorice and that weird pink popcorn that came in a brick and fizzy-hard-candy Zotz. To the cacophony of squeals and splashes from the nearby pool, we’d sit on edge of a park bench or the bike racks and tell dumb jokes and rhymes that we’d learned or an older sibling had shared. We’d pretend we were tough and play recklessly, ironically, on the little kids’ playground when it was empty or jump off the top of the slide and fling each other in fast circles on the hot, metal merry-go-round.

You could still play at the playground as long as you did it in a way in which you might get hurt.

Everyone’s parents knew we were all together. Nobody worried about when we’d get home. We were always home for dinner.

All summers were better than any school year, but there was one special summer with a boy from my middle school. We would buy a rope of licorice and each eat the ends until we nearly met in the middle. It was almost a kiss. A sticky red licorice-scented almost kiss. We didn’t know anything about kissing. We only knew about licorice. About what a quarter would get you. About being teased by our friends.

If we were bored, we would use apple juice to “paint” lines on the asphalt and play two-square (an abbreviated version of four-square). We would play freeze tag or regular tag or just run around on the lawn until we collapsed, breathing hard and looking at the clouds in the sky above to see if we could make out any shapes. The girls in the group would weave daisy chains from the tiny weed flowers in the emerald lawn. We’d try to get the boys to wear the delicate necklaces and sometimes they would, as a laugh. As a joke. As a smile.

Basketball was a possibility if one of us remembered a ball or if some other group had forgotten one on the playground and it wasn’t too deflated. Anyone could play as long as you didn’t cry if you fell down. We’d dare each other do to remarkably stupid things like climb onto the roof to look for wayward tennis balls or silly things like running through sprinklers. We always knew it was getting close to time to go home by the way the light changed in the sky. Nobody wore a watch. Nobody had a phone.

I think of the fashion back then. The terry-cloth with racing stripes and the sneakers with holes. Nobody wore makeup yet, not the real kind of makeup, but girls used Bonnie Bell Lip-Smackers and rollerball perfumes. We had feathered hair and bell-bottom jeans with patches on the rear pockets. Most often we wore older siblings’ hand-me-downs, and if your pants were ripped it was because you ripped them and not because you bought them that way.

Thirst was quenched at water fountains or occasionally an unattended hose. One never forgets the taste of warm water through hot rubber.

Although our core group was mostly closed to outsiders, every so often someone would leave for a vacation—trip to grandma if you were a regular Joe or trip to Hawaii for those whose families had extra. Just as rarely we’d gain a member for a week or two if someone’s cousin showed up from the midwest, and we’d watch that person carefully to see how they talked and dressed. We listened to stories about playing spin-the-bottle. We acted as if we knew what being high was, but we didn’t.

The past is known to be sepia-toned. Adults often mute their memories, like faded photos in a floral-covered album. But if you try, you can go back in time. A smell will get you there—chlorine mixed with sunscreen or hot asphalt or a barbecue in a neighbor’s yard. A taste can be a time machine: grape soda, hose water, licorice.

We get older, if we’re lucky, and some of us get jaded. I don’t know if that’s a thing that happens automatically with each passing year, or if you make an unwitting trade along the way. You get wisdom or experience. You get independence and autonomy.

But I miss the summers, and I miss that crew of misfits, and every so often I will buy a rope of licorice and sit on a park bench and remember what it was like to be young.