Ghosts of Summers Past

Being musically inclined, I associate many times in my life with specific songs. Summer is resplendent with such notable songs (pun intended.) Here are but a few examples:
Mungo Jerry: "In the summertime, when the weather is hot...."
George Gershwin: "Summertime, and the livin' is easy...."
Nat King Cole: "Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer...."
The Jamies: "It's summertime, summertime, sum sum summertime...."
The Lovin' Spoonful: "Hot town, summer in the city...."
Seals & Crofts: "Summer breeze, makes me feel fine...."

I could go on, but usually when I go on like this I totally forget what I was talking about in the first place. I just chalk it up to a flare-up of CRS. The music of summer is second only to the music of Christmastime in my mind. Since Christmas happens in the winter, and I increasingly dislike winter, summer songs rule! I spent many, many hours as a kid listening to Top 40 AM radio, faithfully reproduced in low fidelity by the tiny speaker in my very own transistor radio. It ran on a 9-volt battery and had five transistors! Since the computer you are using to read this has a processor with the equivalent of at least one million transistors, my 1960s-era radio was like a stone ax to a caveman - simple, but it got the job done.

Think back to when you were a kid - say, 11 or 12 years old. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Oops, wait a second - I should have told you read all of the directions first, and then think back, close your eyes and take a deep breath. Do that now, please. The memory of summer when you are young offers a feeling that you just don't forget. It is sight and sound and smell and taste of summers long gone. They are the ghosts of summers past.

Most kids of my generation probably have memories of summer similar to mine. The days were new unstructured, unscheduled adventures unfolding each morning. I remember the smell of summer mornings, the sound of birds singing, that feeling of freedom from school, homework, and just about any of the responsibilities that plague us now as adults. We might have had chores, but other than that - just sweet, sweet freedom. We found things to do everyday, and seldom whined that we were bored.

Some years I went to Boy Scout camp for a week in June. That was the only structured activity I encountered most summers. The Boy Scout summer camp of 1972 will forever live in infamy. That was the year Hurricane Agnes brought torrential rains to my part of the world. It rained most of the week, and by Thursday water was flowing though our tents like miniature rivers. Friday night, the five remaining campers from our troop, along with the scoutmaster, spent the night in the scoutmaster's Volkswagen Beetle. As you can imagine, it was not an enjoyable experience, and our Boy Scout training to that point had not fully prepared us for such circumstances. When my dad took me home the next day, I helped him put our downstairs furniture on makeshift sawhorses and concrete blocks in preparation for the impending river flood. The water came up two feet into the first floor of our home in June of 1972. While it was memorable, it was really not enjoyable.

I recall that I read a lot of Hardy Boys books one summer, though I don't remember how old I was. My friend's father had a huge collection of Hardy Boy books that he collected as a kid, and he would let me borrow them, a few at a time. One summer, I got through them all. Each was a fun, quick read with familiar characters that I got to know as friends.  It was the literary equivalent of binge-watching shows on Netflix today.

Some days were spent riding bicycles, leisurely exploring the island I grew up on. Before you ask, it wasn't an exotic tropical island. It was, and still is, an island in the Ohio River. For a kid on a bike though, it was full of cool places that many adults didn't know about and certainly couldn't access by car. It was magical!

There is one summertime experience that will live forever in my fondest memories. It was the Thomas Joyland Shows. Thomas Joyland Shows was a traveling carnival that made summertime stops all over West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and I'm sure other states, too. It had rides, sideshows, carnival food and carnival games. I would save up pocket change for months to spend at the carnival, and my mom or dad might give me a few bucks to sweeten the pot. You could do a lot at Thomas Joyland with just a little bit of cash when you were 11 years old.

Besides the great carnival foods (I had my first corn dog there,) Thomas Joyland had sideshows. Real live sideshows! Some were not geared towards kids my age. Some, however, had universal appeal. I remember how exciting the barker made the rats from the sewers of Paris sound. "Step right up and see the largest RATS in the world, LIVE from the sewers of Paris, France!"  Each time I heard it, the word 'rat'  just jumped from the barker's mouth like the staccato crack of a gun report! How could I not see the world's largest RATS?

My buddy and I each paid 25 cents to go into the tent housing France's finest vermin. That would be like spending $1.50 today, so it was a handsome sum to see Parisian rodents. Oh, the anticipation! Since I lived on an island in the Ohio River, we sometimes saw what we referred to as river rats. They seemed pretty big to us, but RATS from the City of Lights would surely dwarf them all and live in our nightmares forever!

We paid our money at the booth and got our tickets. The worker at the entrance to the tent silently and solemnly took the ticket from our hands. We walked inside the tent. The air was heavy, with an almost supernatural vibe you could almost see.  There in front of us was a large wooden pen with walls over four feet high! It had to be that high to contain the vicious, snarling, hideous creatures imprisoned within. We walked up to the wall and peered inside. There they were, in all their glory, on a bed of wood shavings. As advertised, they were HUGE! They were as big as a lot of the dogs my friends owned. Heck, they were as big as my dachshund! Wow!

Well, maybe they weren't the size of a German shepherd. What really surprised me was the fact that the world's largest rats from the sewers of Paris were so colorful. They resembled enormous guinea pigs, with some black and white ones and some orange-brown ones. They just sort of lied around, not moving. We knew they were alive because we could see them breathing. I don't think we would run screaming from the tent if one managed to escape. We could easily outrun one. Heck, we would have out crawled one! What a disappointment - no nightmarish vermin here. I have since discovered that these were likely cuy guinea pigs or something similar. Here is a link to some information on cuy guinea pigs: http://www.laguineapigrescue.com/cuy-reports-and-sightings.html

One year I did win a treasured prize by defeating one of those vile, rigged carnival games at Thomas Joyland. I don't remember in which game my victory was won, but I do recall the glorious prize my skillful hand secured. It was a sword! Well, it was a little sword, maybe about four inches long. It had a glossy enameled cobalt blue handle, and came with a genuine vinyl scabbard, or more accurately, a paper-thin vinyl sheath. It was beautiful to my pre-adolescent male eyes. It was actually a letter opener, but since I didn't get much mail back then, to me it was a tiny sword!

My mom was never an 11-year-old boy, and could not comprehend the significance of a fine quality weapon of this caliber to a young male entering adolescence. So, like many things that my mother deemed unsavory or dangerous, it mysteriously disappeared one day, never to be seen again. However, it will live forever as another ghost of summers past.

A Month of Saturdays

During my final year as a public school educator, a fellow teacher asked if I looked forward to retirement. Of course I was! He then mentioned, "Yup! You'll have six Saturdays and a Sunday every week!"

For some reason, this logic did not immediately register in my work-programmed mind. For 30 years I was busy with parades and concerts on Sundays, and pep band on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday evenings during basketball season. I had musical rehearsals from January until the middle of April four evenings per week. We had band shows on Saturdays in the fall. To me, Saturday was often just another workday.

To most people, Saturday is a day to pursue enjoyable pastimes, or maybe catch up on duties around the homestead. Having a week of Saturdays is not as easy as one thinks. It is perfectly fine from my viewpoint to do absolutely nothing on a Saturday every now and then. With a week full of Saturdays, it becomes a problem choosing which Saturday to do nothing on.

If you live in Ohio, or just about any state in the neighborhood, you have had more than enough rain this summer. Most of the time, our big backyard has had areas of water standing in it for days at a time. One particular spot has had water standing in it so much that typical yard vegetation no longer grows. What looks mysteriously like seaweed is beginning to flourish in that spot. I am considering building a dock.

When the rest of the puddles disappear, the ground is still spongy. This makes mowing the lawn challenging. Between developing a mower/boat hybrid and building an ark in my pole barn on some of my many Saturdays, I mow. Mowing the entire lawn at one time has been not occurred for several weeks. Mowing around the temporary ponds leaves tall grass surrounding them and tire tracks in the saturated lawn around them. It ain't pretty, folks.

Last week, due to weather forecasts calling for another inch or three of rain, I actually mowed on a calendar Saturday. This is unacceptable! I mowed on calendar Saturdays for years - at least those Saturdays when I didn't have a school obligation. Now that I have a week FULL of Saturdays, I should not be forced to do yard work on an actual Saturday!! This is an outrage!

 

Confessions of a Retired Music Teacher - Part I

I have always wanted to write something. Apparently this is it.

Introductions are in order. Reader - retired music teacher. Retired music teacher - reader. Now with that out of the way, I can begin my confessions.

I am a retired music teacher. There, I said it. I am retired. Since I have only had two jobs in my entire life, the fact that I am now unemployed is difficult to comprehend. As July would normally be my downtime even when I was teaching band, choir and elementary music, I don't miss teaching...yet.

Not too many teachers stay in their first job unless they have some connection to that community. I must be an exception. Though I had no connection to my school community (in fact, my wife and I moved 250 miles for this teaching gig), I stayed put for 30 years.

Why does one pull the proverbial plug after what most people say was 30 years of successfully and musically educating America's youth? The answer is hoops.

Being a public school teacher is not the noble profession it was when my career began. I remember an undergrad college professor telling us that teachers were on the same plane of regard as priest/minister/rabbi. Public school teachers are now the whipping posts of politicians. All of society's ills, most of which are linked to economic disadvantage, are instead placed on the heads of America's public school teachers.

In that we are deemed lazy and derelict merely by our choice of vocation, we are therefore required to jump through the many, ever-changing hoops set before us by law makers. Most of these law makers answer to wealthy political contributors, so in order to continue reaping those benefits they must legislate hoops for educators to jump through. When teachers are successful in jumping through the hoops set before them, the law makers and their sponsors decide that the hoops must be too low and therefore must be raised. The ultimate goal of this ongoing exercise is for the law maker to rub his or her hands together and gleefully shout, "Ah-HA! I knew you were all lazy incompetents! We MUST privatize education and treat it as any other business!"

Just between us, Big Business is outraged that public school education is a multi-billion dollar industry that actually pays the folks doing the work rather than CEOs, CFOs. board members, etc. That flies in the face of what is holy to the uber-rich. If you get the impression that I do not fancy politicians or billionaires, you would be correct.

The younger kids have changed over the years as well. When I began teaching, young kids were full of wonder. They were like sponges absorbing all teachers could offer. Due to media and internet bombardment, along with a digital pacifier stuck in their tiny faces from birth, young children have an attention span similar to a house fly. I still enjoyed working with high school kids when I retired. The younger kids... eh - not so much.

Well, that is introduction part one. Don't worry - this isn't going to be a political diatribe with each blog entry. I may even entertain you now and then!