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So Long Summer

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Here’s a note that came in early this morning from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden.

Hi Mr. C.,

Well, it’s August, and that means summer is almost over. Just four weeks to go until Labor Day. Ugh! I can’t believe I wasted almost the whole thing. No summer job. No summer romance. And I still haven’t managed to crack level 100 in Crime Wave Zombie Spree, even though I’ve spent almost ten hours on it every single day!

My folks think I’m throwing my life away, but I think the eye – hand coordination I’m developing by playing video games pretty much nonstop is going to be a real valuable skill now and in the future years to come. With machines doing more and more for us, the jobs of tomorrow are going to be mostly button-pushing and joystick bumping marathons, so even the long hours are really, really good practice!

Mr. Boozenporn said in Econ 201 last year that we would have to compete for work with everybody in China, which is a lot of people to have to go up against. And he said the Chinese people know how to work hard, unlike the lazy slobs who grow up in the lap of luxury here in the USA. And then my friend Danny stood up and told Mr. Boozenporn he should be ashamed of browbeating us and lowering our self esteem. Danny said if we started to think we were total losers, we’d flunk all our tests and next year’s Econ 201 class at Wilkie High would be taught online by Mr. Chin from Shanghai!

Everybody thought that was pretty funny. And we all got detention that day.

Anyway, I read this crazy article that said teenagers get extra grumpy in the summer because they get too much daylight, which makes us just like vampires, which is incredibly cool! So I try to act really surly when my parents are around so they’ll start to think maybe I am part vampire, a little bit. What with all the movies and books on the topic if the rumor gets out that I’m kinda bloodthirsty and bat-like, it could help meet girls! I know what you’re going to say – that it won’t matter if I don’t ever leave the basement. Well here’s a secret just between you and me. I’ve been sneaking out of the house around 2 pm every Tuesday and Thursday to go to a nursing home just down the street. I’m the volunteer bingo caller! B-7! G-4! The old people are cool and for some reason I really like watching ping pong balls roll around inside their wire cage.

But don’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t want the folks to think I’m being unselfish ’cause they’d get all dewy eyed about me doing a good deed and it and it really makes me uncomfortable when they blubber. Plus, it would ruin the whole zombie killer – basement rat – part vampire image I’m trying to build.

Your pal,
Bubby

Ever sneak out of the house as a teenager?

81 thoughts on “So Long Summer”

  1. Never did, except once to escape a spurned yet persistent boyfriend who wouldn’t give up. I saw him coming down the street and ran out the back door to my best friend’s house leaving him with my mother. But she knew where to find me and phoned telling me to come home and deal with it myself.

    However, this morning the aging dog snuck out the front door while I was still in my early morning fog. She does not do this much any more, but I think she saw the brazen rabbit in the back yard this morning, getting her all in a frenzy. Her advanced age (12 yrs) seems to thwart the urge to run unfettered now, so she does not stay away long, coming back between the first paragraph and the second. But me, as a teenager. Too responsible for that stuff. Youth wasted I guess.

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    2. Our basset Barney discovered an open side gate early one morning. I had let him out sans collar that morning, so discovering that he was gone led to a bit of a panic. I refrained from charging around the neighborhood in my bathrobe – I managed to pull on clothes. One of the neighbor kids saw him in another front yard and told his dad, “Barney’s out! And I think he’s lost!” (Barney is blind in one eye – another reason for the panic.) Neighbor was first impressed that his son was up and moving so quickly (because he was worried about Barney), and then herded the dog home. Barney seemed to think this was a fine lark. Daughter wouldn’t let him out of her sight for days when she was home. I have made sure since that the gate is closed and his collar is on before I open the back door in the morning. I think I will be glad when he is 12 and is reliably a “doesn’t go far” kinda dog.

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    3. Jacque, you didn’t say “Rise and Shine Babooners” this morning. Guess I’ve come to enjoy that…

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  2. If I were to sneak out when I was a teenager I had to navigate through my parents room to get out. I don’t think this was something they thought of when the refurbished the attic into two bedrooms, but I’m sure it made them feel more secure about where I was It also kept them from having to stay up late waiting for me – they could hear me come in…and I was prone to staying out veeeeery late. For better or worse, my parents trusted me (and my friends). With two adamant non-smokers and three children of alcoholics (who were, in this case, adamantly no-alcohol) in the group, the worst that happened was Clint Eastwood or Mad Max movie marathons and too much Mountain Dew. And probably far too much quoting of Monty Python.

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    1. Rise and Forget to say Shine when the dog ran out the door.

      My Grandma used to say that early in the morning. I just love saying it, too.

      Thanks

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  3. oh i had friends who were perfect for this. the best rememberence was the time justin was staying at steve’s , steve at my house and me at justins. the night was one without retreat. we couldn’t show up anywhere because we were all supposed to be somewhere else. we wandered around the neighborhood all night keeping our eyes open for the evening crusiers of patrol. someones mom did call the next day and we were found out but the consequences were not memorable to make a dent. the evening was. we called it “having an adventure”

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  4. I never did, and my son never did, either. my daughter’s best friend lives across the street, so that’s really as far as she would go, anyway. My terrier is a door darter, and frequently makes a break to run around the neighborhood until we can catch her, and the cats, well, they think sneaking out of doors is great until they get there and realize there is no ceiling and then are very upset. The adolescent population with whom I work are aces at sneaking out but always get caught and in these days, it just isn’t a safe thing to do. We have a July phenomenon here where we always lose a girl or two with the carnival, and law enforcement have to drag them back from Montana where they have fled with the loves of their lives. What’s really weird is when we lose a mother or two with the carnival. I just don’t get it.

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    2. oh Renee, those “carnies” are so mysterious and the unknown is so attractive when you have grown up in a little town. that happened where i grew up also – girls running off with the folks who ran the little midway at the county fair. or the pipeline guys – or the folks who came to work in the fields for the local canning factory. anybody from out there, where it was interesting and exciting.
      i never was brave enough – the fear of my mom was much greater than my need for excitement.
      OT – had to re-do the little Girls’ pen yesterday because Lassi persisted in finding a place to get her head stuck. lost count at 12 times. now her head is where it’s supposed to be – free and at the top of her neck but i seriously don’t think it’s doing her much good there.

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      1. My daughter gets so irritated with us since we won’t let her go to the carnival. Her best friend’s mother won’t allow friend to go, either, so we have lots of support for our decision. In our town its just trouble.

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      4. Barb, having met your more senior goat staff, the thought occurs that you perhaps have inflated expectations. Maybe Lassi is just your average Earthling goat and the rest are from an advanced civilization (did I say that right without giving away too much, Alba?)

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    3. That’s just weird — the carnies here have missing teeth and aren’t anyone I want to be too close to for very long.

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      1. A couple of emergency room nurses I know told me that in the early 70’s, the carnival was in town and a couple of the workers got into a fight with one another and came to the ER for treament. The nurses had to get them cleaned up before the doctor could stitch them up, and they were totally grossed out by the mold growing between their toes. (It had been really rainy, but, still!)

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      2. Dale,

        I was always involved as a social services agent. No, it never turned out well — ever.

        In the book Water for Elephants (about the circus) that turns out ok, but it is not a carnival per se and the main character is a veteranarian.

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  5. There’s no way I ever could have sneaked out. My mom is an extremely light sleeper and would’ve woken up to the door opening or the car turning on. There wasn’t really any reason for me to sneak out either. I wasn’t the rebellious teenager who has to get out and party. I was a good child (well, mostly). I even had a curfew of 11 pm. I obeyed it most of the time, though sometimes, I would try to push it a little later 🙂

    It was fun when my older brother would visit from college because then my younger brother and I could stay out later if we were with him. Those were fun times. We explored Owatonna by night, going places we wouldn’t normally go during the day. It’s not that we couldn’t go there during the day, we just never did.

    The only time I remember even coming close to getting into trouble was when my younger brother, his friend and I were at a park in town. We didn’t realize that the parks “closed” at 10 and a cop showed up, doing a routine check of the grounds. We were just sitting on the playground, talking, and he must have seen my car in the parking lot. He was looking around for whoever drove the car there. He drove down the path, and we headed back to the car. He came back and asked us what we were doing there after the park had closed. We told him that we didn’t know it was closed and we were just talking. He didn’t believe us, asked us for our ID (I was the only one old enough to have ID), and then he called for backup! Haha, he was a rookie cop and didn’t have the authority to write a ticket. As we were waiting for the backup, we called our parents and let them know we might be a little late. Four more cop cars pulled into the parking lot and the older cops let us go. My parents weren’t even mad, haha.

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  6. Just once. Had a slumber party, 8 girls on a Friday night, probably 8th grade. My mom had fixed up the (unfinished) basement somehow to accomodate us. Veeerrry late, after the folks slept, we all decided it would be smart to T.P. Phil Mount’s house, under 2 miles away. IN OUR PAJAMAS we walked West, under the viaducts near the train yards… When I think of it now I can’t believe how stuipd… If memory serves we also caught Kenny Paxson’s on the way back!

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  8. Nope, I was always way too much of a ‘good’ kid to do something like that. One of my brothers did. He snuck out to see his girlfriend after it was ‘lights out’ in the house. If I remember right, I think my Dad threatened to put his ‘lights out’ when he found out.

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  9. Good stories folks. I won’t be participating, as I have a broken computer. This is written on a laptop whose keyboard I cannot use. I was never the kind of kid who would sneak out anyway, unlike the delinquents and degenerates who have posted here about their nocturnal prowling. Have a wonderful day, everyone.

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  10. Greetings! I would never have thought of sneaking out as a teenager — I was a good, responsible, obedient child. After I turned 18 (drinking age in Wis back then), I might have stayed out really late a few times — and my mom waited up for me once, which was horrifying.

    My older sisters would give my mom a scare though. When they stayed out too late, Mom would wake up us younger kids and desperately ask us if Lori or Tessie had told us where they were going. Of course, we didn’t have a clue. But then we would be awake when they did come home and hear Mom’s wrath descend on them, which we got a kick out of it. Dad was more subtle — at breakfast next morning, he would ask, “So where were you until 3:23am?”, when sisters thought they had bypassed parental eyes in middle of the night. He loved those newfangled digital clocks back then.

    By the time my youngest sister was old enough to pull these stunts, my parents had chilled considerably. Chris got away with murder. She would deliberately do or say something vaguely shocking just to see what Mom would do — and was lucky to get a roll of the eye and raised eyebrows. This is a funny dynamic in our family. Of course, Andy, the golden boy (first boy born in Dad’s entire family), never got in trouble that I recall, or at least wasn’t supervised to the extent us girls were.

    Stay cool today, Babooners!

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  11. wow, flood of memories;i snuck out all the time and looked at it as a matter of survival (emotionally); it was the middle 60’s and still quite safe to run around in the middle of the night, it was fun and i have no regrets
    also left home for college at 17 and never went back
    hot, no ac, dogs are even unhappy

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    1. We too survive with just fans and climate control (shading the offending windows). Relief is on the way, dew point is supposed to be dropping all day.

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      2. I wish! Getting ready for National Night Outers in my back yard… Why did I say I’d host? 2nd time this summer I’ve had guests on one of the hottest, muggiest days…

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    2. Wow. I was starting to think I was the only one. I was pretty rebellious and my folks meant well, but the leash was very short. We grew up on the west side of Cannon Lake. In the mid 70s it was rural and quite safe. A group of us would sneak out and meet. We’d walk for hours on the gravel roads, with the moon shining, the frogs and toads calling, the owls passing silently overhead. When I went through puberty I had a torturous year of insomnia. I swear I didn’t sleep all year when I was 13. I’d walk the county road to the bridge and sit on the bridge staring at the moon shining on the lake. I really wanted to sleep, but watching the moon on the water was probably what I really needed. I don’t regret it either.

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  12. Morning!

    Speaking of kids today is our sons 18th birthday and we just gave him a rousing chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’! (The fact he is up this ‘early’ was a special bonus) He is a really great kid; would never dream of sneaking out and spends many of his days volunteering with kids and is in fact looking into youth ministry for college. Leaving on the church mission trip to Mexico on Friday. I’ll stop bragging for the moment.

    I was the youngest of five so also got away with murder comparably… and since we live in the country it was hard to sneak out anyway… my parents wouldn’t wait up but Mom was also a light sleeper so I think she knew when I came home even if they didn’t talk about it. Only once I stayed out very late and found out the next morning that Dad had gone looking for me. Oops.

    I remember once I was down in Florida visiting a friend and because my legs were terribly sunburned, I was laying on the cool tiles of his bathroom floor at 3 AM when my friends little brother snuck back in through the bathroom’s exterior door. I think we scared each other.

    And dogs; we have three– two outdoor and one mostly indoor. The older mature sleeping dog, the middle age ‘stupid’ dog who really is the best watch dog but also leads the little indoor dog into temptation and our little stray / rescue indoor dog.
    Middle dog chased away what was probably a coyote the other day. Middle of the day and said coyote was sneaking up on my chickens. I only got a glimpse of it as the dog chased it away but it just didn’t quite look like a coyote; head was smaller and coat was smoother… so I’m not spreading rumors or anything but it just didn’t quite look like a coyote.

    Have good days!

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      1. Hi Barbara in Robbinsdale–

        Well, coyotes generally sort of look like big dogs; sort of brownish / gray shaggy coats and longer nose. And mostly when you see them they’re running the other way. And they will run a long way if spooked.
        This was sort of light brown but had a smaller head; not such a pronounced nose and the tail seemed to be smoother. Plus the coat in general was smoother and not so shaggy.
        …like I say; I only got a glimpse as it ran back into the trees.

        We do have coyotes here; we hear them yipping at night frequently and I have seen them chasing the chickens in the middle of the day before. And once several years ago, a coyote sat in the bean field and watched us combine. When we drove to that end of the field it would get up and walk into the corn field, but after we turned around it would come back out and lay down again. I got a fuzzy picture of it later in the day. DNR says, yep; sometimes they get accustomed to people.

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  13. Good Morning to All,

    Apparently most people who participate in this blog were good kids who were not very likely to sneak out on their parents and I’m another one of those. I did spend some time roaming around during the day when I was a kid and did show up late for diner once in a while which was not appreciated. Once I went too far out on some thin ice on a pond I was exploring and was only able to get to shore by pulling myself in by grabbing the edge of the ice which kept breaking off as I moved forward. I didn’t tell my folks about this. No one seemed to worry too much about where I went during the day. Behind our house there was a big waste area including rail road tracks and a swamp that I liked to explore.

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  14. Never not ever. And where would the minister’s daughter in a small town have gone anyway?

    Nice to see you developing some other interests, Bubby.

    It is sad to see the summer coming to a close with so few of our goals for it met.

    I did get a reprieve on the free-lance side of work, and to celebrate, harvested the garlic. First time I have ever planted it (and about all that got planted this year) and could not be more pleased with the results.

    Am thinking I need to get some chicken, maybe roast a bunch of it.

    Our cat (chief of homeland security) has never been one for confinement, and will sometimes decide to stay out all night, because it is cooler to sleep on her chair on the porch. Heard some genuine caterwalling about 2am, and opened the door to have her come streaking in to her food bowl. She is obviously getting to old to want to hang out with the delinquents in the neighborhood.

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      1. My parents moved to Akron 2 weeks before I started college, so I never really lived there. Did carpool with Pastors Lee and Kramer’s kids from Luther though. Not sure which church they were at. The ELCA Lutheran one, whichever that was.

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  15. Ok, I have been told by Joanne not to tell my life story, because I have “several” adventures relating to today’s topic. Plus, I am sort of hesitant to, since it might make every one think she married a real nut. (haha)

    I started my wanderings early, at 5 years old, or at least from what I remember. This story will be about the time when I was 13, since there is more to it than the other adventures I could tell you about. I have to preface this with some history. The year prior to this event in my life, I had gone to the Boundary Waters area in Minnesota for a week, with the local Boy Scout troop. I had a blast, canoeing and swimming and camping out in the quiet wilderness.
    The next year, mid-summer, I decided to go out on a trip on my own. I didn’t tell anyone! I packed up a backpack that I had used before. It was a large light khaki, canvas contruction pack, with pockets on the sides that had snaps to close and a zipper pocket on the back. I filled it with items that I thought would be useful. I also took my savings bonds. I got up early in the morning on a bright sunny day at sunrise and started walking. I don’t recall if I even had a destination in mind, but I walked across the bridge in town and stared up the other side of the river on the abandoned railroad tracks.
    After a while, I was getting tired of carrying a heavy pack and decided it would be easier to go up river by boat. I “borrowed” a canoe I found and started out with the pack on the bottom of the canoe in front of me. (I had complete intentions of returning it when I was done and I was later told , when the canoe had been returned , that it belonged to the sheriff of the neighboring town! oops!)
    It was good that I had the canoe, because I hadn’t packed a tent, and was able to use the canoe as a shelter to place my sleeping bag under. (go figure!)

    I could probably bore you with more details. But long story short, I was gone for 8 days, and my poor parents had everyone looking for me. Oh, of course they were all looking downstream. Someone on his way to work had seen me walking, and since we had all seen the new “Tom Sawyer” movie the week before, they made the wrong assumption as where to look.

    I don’t recall being punished. My mom was crying when she got the call. I don’t remember my dad’s reaction at all. Maybe I blocked it out. It must of not been that memorable.

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    1. Jim, I can just imagine the workings of your mind and how it made perfect sense at the time. I can also imagine how awful it must have been for your parents. Is paddling up river symbolic of how you have lived your life since you were 14?

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    2. Your Savings Bonds? And would we actually think there was a problem with Joanne being married to a complete nut?

      Great story.

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    3. I have to say, I’m impressed that you were gone for 8 days…and that you paddled upstream, haha. What did you do? Though, thinking about it now, it’d be nice to disappear for 8 days…

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    4. After my first day of canoeing, I decided to set up camp near the mouth of a stream on the east side of the river. I had avoided contact with any one all day. I made a fire and cooked up a can of beans that I had brought with.
      The second day I made it further up river to a State park on the West side of the river. I was too windy to light a fire and again I had stayed to myself the whole day, just paddling the canoe as far as I thought I could go in one day.
      The morning of the next day, I came to a town on the river and parked the canoe, so that I could go in town and replenish my food supplies. I remember getting some corn on the cob. I remember a seeing a group walking around with Ice cream cones. I left that town and paddled further up river, I made camp on a peninsula that I found out soon was part of some ones private property . I met a girl, I had never known before, my age at that location. I ended up staying there for the rest of my time, spending some time each seeing her. I had received permission to stay on the peninsula for a couple days, but the her parents eventually asked me to find somewhere else to camp. I move to another park just a 1/2 mile south of there. The next day when I was walking back to visit with her , a police officer was patrolling the area and stopped and asked me who I was. That was the end of my adventure.

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      1. Thanks for giving us more details. I often fantasized about doing something like that, but never dared.

        Maybe when the s&h is grown up and I no longer have to be a good example……

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      3. Obviously a movie must be made about this adventure, although some of the crucial details will have to change. The girl will have to be a starlet, her mother might have a gun, there could be river gangsters involved and you might not survive it, Jim. I’m sure there’s a proven Hollywood formula that can be applied to your life story. You won’t recognize it when all is said and done, but you’ll be famous!

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      2. it’s like “eraserhead” only without the hallucinations and the chicken that bleeds.

        sorry Jim in Big Lake – it’s Donna’s fault.

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      3. oh MAN, I can’t think of another movie that it’s not like…

        So many questions come to mind about this story, Jim in Big Lake, but the first was “WHAT did you eat besides canned beans??”

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      6. You’re all cynics. Actually, the girl bears a strong resemblance to Venus on the Half-shell (only wearing a bathing suit), and they end up living happily, if not richly on his Savings Bonds.

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  16. hey jim welcome. good story. your wife ahs told us some amazing things about you. ask her to retell a couple for you. camping for a week without a tent. good thinking jim.

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  17. Why I Never Snuck Out of My Parents House at Night as a Teenager
    (A Prose Poem in Five Sentences in Memory of Lost Youth)

    My brother, seven years older than I, who could never please our anger-managed father and who proved to be an Atlas at carrying a grudge, at sixteen built a cabin, and quite a good job he made of it too with the skills he had learned from our father, 500 yards from our house on land that was left to woods because it would supposedly one day be used to extend the county road that ended at our house, but even now 56 years later it is still woods except for the hint of clearing in which a collapsed jumble of lumber molders back into the earth, a kingdom for mice and worms and insects.

    He, three days after graduating from high school with a deliberately undistinguished academic record, was gone off to boot camp in the navy, thereby leaving me the cabin then and thereafter always called “The Shack,” which implies an impermanence and an insignificance that my memories belie.

    My friend Dennis and I would collect our coins until we had enough to buy a large jug of pop and some candy, always including Milk Duds and Holloway Slo-Poke suckers, so we could spend a night of sugared revelry before sleeping in the retreat from our parents and their vegetable-laden meals with my dog Boots, who only tolerated the Shack and the barn as buildings in which he would sleep and then only restlessly in the Shack, always eager to pursue some smelled quest into his larger world of the acres of woods that surrounded our farm.

    In my upper teenage years, after Dennis, two years older than I, had also gone off to the navy, I would often spend the night there alone except for Boots and the mice, who would always, even today in the moldering pile that remains, have known they hold the deed, away from a father lost in his bitter memories and driven by future worries, which no doubt included whether or not I would become the man he envisioned, largely a copy of himself, which I am only in a few wrong ways, and a mother of whom I am more of a copy, who no doubt was glad of this safe place for a teenage son to feel falsely master of his time, space, and ego, which like all of us, I have never been.

    Two years ago they tell me the house was burned down by area volunteer fire squads as practice, but they did not know to also drive 500 yards down into the hayfields and practice on the moldering pile, so thus whatever remains of the Shack outlived the house.

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    1. pretty cool, Clyde

      wanted to tell you also, Clyde – that one of the films at the Free Range Film Festival was called “Old Clyde Road” and it was great. illustrations set to the song. fun.

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      1. Set to what song?
        Clyde in popular media is a sort of sore point with me; except for the brief time of the movie Bonnie and Clyde, which is being remade in all its gore, the name Clyde has not fared well.

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  18. Prayer in the Morning Fog

    The pains awake me early, as they always do.
    I peek past curtains to check the summer day,
    To see soft fog color the world in pale blue.
    To my wife who still sleeps there is nothing to say.

    Before I leave the rule of habits do decree,
    Bird seed I delver through the fog’s soft glow.
    So when she wakes the birds she will see,
    Looking in at her from the feeder by the window.

    But I see scattered across the bedewed grass,
    The work of spiders, lace in pearl white.
    I stop and wonder how they came to pass
    And are they woven only in the night.

    The fog’s heavy dew is what makes then show.
    On other mornings they cannot be seen.
    How often I have stepped on them I do not know.
    Because through them shows underlying green.

    Seldom I look, seldom I am ready to find
    Wonders woven under God’s calloused hand.
    Too much, or else nothing, is on my mind.
    In worry I let the world seem bland.

    Fog, which usually befuddles our sight,
    This day bespeckles the spider’s hard labor.
    God, grant that in your bright light,
    I will learn who is my neighbor.

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  19. I predict Dale’s blog tomorrow will be about the triceritops, but don’t tell him I said so or he might change what he does.

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