I can’t believe another summer has passed. I’m totally relieved, of course: Anything that brings me closer to Halloween is A-OK, in my book!
Anyway, this weekend, I had a discussion with a dear friend, regarding a vital piece of the child-rearing puzzle. Something sacred and integral to creating long-lasting summer memories:
Otter Pops.
More specifically, blue Otter Pops. Because, you know, they make you have to cough. Something about them gives you a tickle in your throat, which cannot be ignored. If you eat a blue Otter Pop, you will have to cough — It's one of those great mysteries of life. And yet, if you ask me which color I'd like I'll pick the blue one, every time. Ten-Year-Old Me would have made the same choice, I am sure of it.
Ahhh summer... Being a kid during the summer months was pretty magical, wasn't it? Although, if I could have spoken to Just-Graduated-From-Fifth-Grade Me, I would have told her to make sure to wear lots of sunblock, since this would be the summer that she would burn her face so badly that the tip of her nose would swell up and almost fall off. I'm sure she would have raised her right eyebrow (I still do that, when I think someone is saying something, well, nutty) and said, "Uhm, like, yeahsure and what is sunblock, anyway?" Remember when parents thought that getting that first really good burn was the best way to prepare a child's tender skin for the next few months of exposure to UVA rays?
I also would have warned her that letting her friend's sixteen-year-old sister cut her hair in July would be an unwise choice, even if the budding stylist says that she just wants to give Eleven-Year-Old Me a "trim".
That was the same summer that I began seriously crushing on the boys from the cast of Stand By Me. Okay, maybe not Jerry O'Connell — he didn't really get cute until at least 1991 —but I spent a lot of time looking through issues of Teen Beat and Tiger Beat, trying to find photos of River Phoenix.
HE WAS SUCH A FRIGGIN' CUTIE!
My BFF and I would ride our bikes to the movie theater down the street while our parents were at work, because tickets were only fifty cents and nobody cared if you hopped from screen to screen, all day long. The movies were a few years past their prime, but it didn't matter: We saw Purple Rain enough times to have memorized the lines — though most of what we were quoting was way, way over our heads.
(Yes, I really did just tell you that two eleven-year-old girls were allowed to ride their bikes to a discount movie theater and sit in the dark with strangers watching Rated R movies, for hours and hours at a time. It was a long time ago. If the internet had been around, I'm sure we would have in the house, chatting with strangers, for hours at a time.)
We had MTV (at least my BFF did), but you can only sit through so many dozens of hours of Wang Chung's "Everybody Have Fun Tonight", before you have to move on to the next activity.
Funny, but those are the memories that make me smile. Sunburns, bad haircuts, movies: All of those things were —and are— part of being a kid during summertime.
And blue Otter Pops. Don't forget the Otter Pops
