Now that July has arrived, bringing with it the dog days of summer, do you ever reminisce about bygone vacations? Something about the tropical weather and the long days makes many of us want to pause and remember summers past.
My first memory of going to the beach was when I was about four. My family would spend the last week of July at my grandparents’ cottage at Atlantic Beach, where we would spend our time swimming in the ocean and running up and down the sand dunes.
In the midst of all this activity, I managed to slip away one day and explore a large, sandy area close to the cottage. Being the curious child that I was, I began digging to see what I might discover. Instead of finding a treasure chest filled with gold or a map drawn by a pirate, I began pulling up spoons, cups, plates, and pots.
My mother showed up about this time, most likely having kept her eye on me while I was busy digging. She picked up a couple of pots and looked at them carefully. After studying them for a few minutes, she told me she thought they probably belonged to homeowners whose cottages had been destroyed when Hurricane Hazel came through Atlantic Beach a few years earlier in 1954.
Upon hearing this, my overactive imagination took over. Was this the same storm that carried Dorothy from Kansas to Oz? If so, she managed to ride out the storm and land in a magical place. Some of the people at Atlantic Beach weren’t so lucky — they saw their cottages and everything in them blown away or buried in the sand. Somehow, that didn’t seem fair to me.
Several summers later, when I was about eight, I learned another important lesson. My mother had taken my baby brother for a swim at the park near our house, and my sisters and I were enjoying a rare morning of independence.
I was lying on my bedroom floor listening to the radio — that for some inexplicable reason was under the bed — when I smelled smoke. I immediately discovered that smoke was coming from the radio. In a state of panic, I turned the radio off (it didn’t occur to me to unplug it), ran outside, jumped on my bicycle, and headed for the park.
When I got to the park and told my mom what had happened, she grabbed my brother and ran all the way home. Almost breathless from running, Mom rushed into the bedroom. She unplugged the radio, threw it in the kitchen garbage can, and proceeded to interrogate me: “Why was the radio under the bed? Why didn’t you unplug it when it began smoking? Why would you listen to The Beatles when you could listen to Nat King Cole?”
For a long time after this incident, my sisters and I listened to the radio in the living room so that my mother could keep an eye on us to make sure we weren’t accidentally setting anything on fire or listening to The Beatles.
Four summers later, my mother inadvertently took us to a movie with adult themes. “The Graduate,” a satire starring Dustin Hoffman, was a big hit with moviegoers. My mother thought it would be the perfect film for us to see.
Driving downtown to the theater, my mother seemed excited to see a movie she had heard so much about. While we stood at the ticket booth, I noticed that the woman working in the booth gave my mom a strange look. She asked my mom how old we were, and when Mom listed our ages, the woman leaned forward and whispered that some of the scenes might be inappropriate for us. We went in anyway.
When the “inappropriate scenes” appeared, Mom stared straight ahead. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be sharing her thoughts with us.
I learned some important lessons from my summer vacations: I learned that beautiful beaches can be hit by dangerous storms and that smoking radios should be unplugged.
My mother, too, learned some important lessons from one of my summer vacations: She learned when someone warns you about “inappropriate scenes” in a movie you should heed the warning. She also learned there may be something worse than listening to The Beatles.
Read CityView Magazine’s “The Military Issue” July e-edition here.