I’m embarrassed to admit it – I had forgotten all about perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden until a surprise e-mail showed up late last night!
Hey Mr. C.,
How’s your summer?
Mine started out cool because I haven’t been able to find a job (again). And that means long days at home in the basement, playing video games with my buddies Skeeter and Doug until we can’t stand it, which means we play for a very very long time.
My folks complain and roll their eyes and say we’re wasting our brains, but I think it’s really a good thing to play video games non-stop. Our hand-eye coordination gets to be super good, and we learn to cooperate or at least not kill each other, which we don’t, mostly.
I mean we do, but only on the screen.
Anyway, they say we’re getting dumb and violent. But have they looked at what’s been happening with our thumb strength? I’ll bet unemployed American teenagers have got the quickest and most muscular thumbs in the world, by far.
Kids with strong thumbs are important in history. There was that Dutch kid who used his to plug a hole in the dike. And don’t forget Little Jack Horner! If not for his thumb, that Christmas Pie would still be all full of plums!
And what about in modern times? Today, thumbs are what you use for texting. And texting is communication. And communication is survival!
What if I saw a logging truck rolling out of control down a steep mountain, and the only way to stop it in time was to text for help? Somebody your age would take forever to send that message, but I could do it in seconds! So maybe playing video games all the time is the best thing we could be doing. Our thumbs could save the world. You never know!
Anyway, that’s not why I wrote.
I wrote because my cool summer has turned awful, and I blame the Governor of Minnesota and those legislative leaders. What a bunch of goofballs! Just because they didn’t get their work done, tens of thousands of state workers stayed home this week.
Do you know what that means? Hundreds of thousands of state workers’ kids now suddenly have to deal with mom or dad or BOTH hanging around all day, saying fun-killing stuff like “why don’t you clean your room?” and “You cook the dinner tonight” and calling down the stairs with rude, disrespectful comments, like “Time to mow the lawn!” and “Get outside and take a walk for God’s sake!”
This is ruining summer. I’m serious! If I have to go outside, do you know what kind of trouble I’ll get into? Me neither! It’s scary.
Please, I’m begging Governor Macy’s and all those taxophobic legislators – get your work done so Minnesota’s teenagers can get furloughed parents out of their hair and back to work!
I’ll pay you to settle it up. Seriously. I’ve got access to lots of cash ever since my folks stopped trusting banks and began stashing their savings in the dresser drawer. Piles of money – all yours to balance the budget. And you don’t have to call it a tax. How about a “Delinquency Suppression Fee”.
Your pal,
Bubby
I’m worried that Bubby is willing to steal money out of his parents’ dresser drawer to help fund state government, and that he doesn’t know the name of the department store that gave the Governor his millionaire status. Difficult times can drive desperate people to say confusing things that they don’t really mean.
What was your worst summer vacation ever?
Trail Baboon 
This one isn’t so hot; and I don’t have a basement full of video games.
If I had Bubby’s ear, I would lecture him about how I worked from sun-up to sun-down at his age. Such tales did no good with my kids, but they used to tell me that venting was good fro me.
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Good question, Dale. I wanted to write a short answer today, but the right answer isn’t short. My family took a vacation at a resort on the North Shore of Lake Superior in 1987. On the drive up, my boat trailer blew a tire. I had to leave my boat unguarded for two days along the side of the road with about $4,000 worth of fishing equipment in it, visible and free for the taking. The boat wasn’t plundered, but I was an emotional wreck by the time we returned to the boat, fixed the trailer and headed north again.
On our first night of fishing, I hooked a large trout. Ten-year old Molly knocked it off my hook with a beginner’s netting technique. I wasn’t concerned. I was writing expert articles in those days about catching fish in the Great Lakes, and I was confident in my skills. No . . . make that “cocky.”
That was why it was so embarrassing to catch nothing in the next six days. I never had another hit. I tried every trick I’d heard of and fished dawn to dusk, but that first fish was my last. I became glum, then disgusted and finally outraged. What had I done to deserve this humiliation? Molly and Kathe tried to cheer me up, but toward the end of the week they wisely fled any room that I entered, for I was beyond comforting. I drove home in a bilious funk.
And here is the part that is hard to describe. After a day or two at home, I became ashamed of myself. I could not avoid the monstrous irony of letting the pursuit of fun turn into a hissy fit of self-pity. On that trip, the joke was on me–the self-proclaimed expert who couldn’t catch one fish in seven days–only I had been too much of a crybaby to laugh. I realized that there was no excuse for ever again letting disappointment ruin a rare chance to restore myself in the company of my family and in the presence of so much beauty.
A horrible vacation turned into a splendid epiphany. And unlike so many “aha!” moments in my life, the lesson was burned so deep in my soul that I never again made that same mistake. So I lost the trout but landed a bit of wisdom, and that’s a pretty favorable trade :).
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Very nice Steve – very, very nice.
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yes, indeed – very nice.
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don’t cry to me a bour it you little whiner
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I can’t think of a bad vacation – I haven’t done much traveling because it’s out of my budget, so just about any experience outside of Minnesota is fun for me. When I do take time off it’s usually because I have a home repair project to do, or I’m helping to put on a music festival 🙂
There was a week-long canoe trip on the Namekagon River several years ago that was nothing but rain. It just poured day and night. The clothes, tents, sleeping bags – everything was wet all the time. It was really a beautiful trip on the Namekagon though – if you’ve never done it, you should try it. But make sure you’ve got sunny weather. That’s the only really bad one I can think of!
A vacation is what you make it and, really, it can be anything! So, I’m calling this bit of time off my unpaid vacation and I’m making the most of it! Except for the lousy pay and the worry, I’m having a good time! The house is clean, the lawn is mowed, the weeds are pulled – I even got some time to go to a rally and to lounge around in the sun! I haven’t been shopping or putting gas in the car though…
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Good job Krista; make the most of it and try not to worry too much.
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You could open a lemonade stand with the transformation you are making of your “vacation ” lemons! 🙂
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What a lovely, positive statement. I had one Namekagon canoe trip during peak wood tick season. Have you ever had so many ticks on you that you begin to feel them when they aren’t really there? Woooooooo!
If you can make it to Saint Paul, I can offer that cabin experience at very close to “free” prices!
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Well said, Krista! I’ve had very few vacations in the conventional sense in my adult life too, but time that is my own to spend as I choose is always a welcome thing.
Just trying to remember-when is that upcoming music festival? where do we go? and most important of all in these tough economic times-how much will it cost???? (just in case tim is off today)
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good attitude is 100% of the deal. thanks, Krista
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Morning–
Middle of July when I was 14, I hurt my leg in a farm accident leading to three weeks in the hospital and months in a full leg cast and crutches. So that messed up my summer vacation. Probably my parents’ summer and fall as well.
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Nuthin’ hotter than a cast in summer
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I’m with you, Ben. One summer when I was about the same age – 14 – I was working as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a country club not far from my house. While handling a tray of glasses I slipped on a wet spot on the floor and went down with glass crashing all around me. The result was a nasty cut at the base of the index finger of my right hand, severing a tendon. After an operation to re-attach the tendon, I spent several weeks with my entire right mitt wrapped in gauze and essentially useless. In spite of a few months’ worth of physical therapy, I was unable to curl the finger back – to this day it sticks out with a perpetual curve that is just right for typing but not much else. I can point you in the right direction, as long as the right direction involves going over a gentle hill or making a gradual curve to the left.
Crummy summer.
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hey since when do you get to tell stories on this blog?
nice o have you back among the bloggers during prime time rather than 8 hours after it starts (he says 24 hours after it is first posted) i’ll bet you got a big settlement and disability pay from the country club from their negligence. .
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Three young kids in the back seat of a small car. One kid refused to sit by a window, which meant she had to sit in between the other two kids. Unfortunately, she also totally freaked out if anybody touched her in any way, no matter how slightly. The longish drive seemed ten times as long with all the bickering and shrieking in the back seat. And, yes, it kept up for the entire trip there and back. Add to that, the fact that the tent trailer we borrowed was well-suited to two people but not to five. It was fine for sleeping five, but if it was raining and I was trying to cook supper, then I was definitely not a happy camper – which meant nobody else was happy, either. Not much laughter on that trip.
I have vague memories of some vacation as a kid with my parents and three siblings. Don’t know exactly where we were, but it was somewhere in Minnesota. We stopped at the house of some friends of my parents. My parents left us 4 kids in the car while they had a “short visit” with their friends. It seemed mighty long to us, and it turned from merely long and boring to nauseating when the youngest kid had a sudden and unannounced diarrhea problem. We vacated the car for the fresh air of outdoors. I have no memory of how my parents reacted when they finally came back to the car and found tthree gagging kids and one very messy one but I imagine they weren’t too happy.
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sounds like a crappy trip edith
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I don’t recall ever having a “bad’ vacation experience – but driving in an un-air conditioned car with black plastic seats cross country makes for a less-than-pleasant road trip. It was a family trip to the east coast – I’m sure my dad had some flavor of church music convention to work (he worked for a Lutheran publishing company and was in music sales), and my parents planned the trip around that. It wasn’t an unpleasant trip, though I could have done with a couple fewer stops in graveyards looking for dead ancestors…can’t say it was a total loss, though, since that was the trip where my mom uncovered the story about the founding aunt who successfully defended herself during the Massachusetts witch trials.
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1976 – Steve and i had been married two years and were STILL in school (we tarried a long time at UM). my Mom wanted to drive to Tennessee to see my brother, who was in graduate school in icthyology (save the snail darter!!!!) at the time. that was all well and good. i did most of the driving, we shared gas expenses, and that was fine. but Mom wanted to share motel rooms on the way down and back, so there i was. in bed with my husband and in the bed right next to us, my mother and my husband whispering “do this or i’ll scream real loud.”. weirdest, weirdest, weirdest. and i guess we were too poor to say no to that proposition. that same trip, one of the motels (and room we shared with her) was in Keokuk, IA. in the dining room that night, on the organ, was an Elvis impersonator. and there was a mayfly uprising (or whatever one calls that) that night also. i wish that i had a sense of humor about it all back then because it was pretty funny but then i wasn’t laughing. too young, i guess.
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Barb, I’m betting you meant my mother and my father whispering “do this or i’ll scream real loud.” 🙂
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It’s a better story the way BiB wrote it!
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betcha a dollar it was steve whisering to barb to do it or hed scream and embarrass barb. love it.
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Hey all… sorry I missed the action earlier today. My worst vacation story is quite long — way too long for today.
Another “memorable” vacation was the three-week trek that my folks decided to make out west when I was in the 8th grade. We had one of those old wooden-sided station wagons — with all the luggage in the pull-along trailer/camper, my sister and I had the whole back of the car to ourselves. My father was an early morning driver; he thought getting up at 5 a.m. and driving through the early hours as the only way to travel. As you can imagine, my sister and I slept and slept and slept in the back of that car. My mother’s photos of that trip are all the same… my sister and I, bleary-eyed, standing stupidly in front of some fabulous backdrop (Grand Tetons, Great Salt Lake). Then we, as a family, turned out to not be well-suited to camping, even in a camper. And by the time we hit Nevada, I had begun my campaign to memorize “On My Way to Solla Sollew” by Dr. Seuss. I’ve always wondered if this was the reason my folks decided to hurry home after the Grand Canyon – they even drove through the night.
Not a horrible vacation, but definitely weird!
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Hello to all:
I’ve been out of town and away from my computer most of the day. This was due to a very short one night vacation from Clarks Grove to the Cities to go to the Amanda April reception and showing of her film The Future at the Walker. That was Friday night followed by an over night stay in the Cities. The Future will open at the Lagoon theatre in the cities on July 12th and I think it is a very outstanding film that all of you would enjoy.
I don’t remember a vacation that went completely wrong, but parts of several vacations weren’t good. We seemed to have bad luck with people getting sick on vacations. One was a case of food poisoning, another was appendicitis, then there was sickness apparently due to black fly bites and, not to be forgotten, a heavy chiggers infestation due to a bad placement of a tent. Most of these problems were solved and the rest of these vacations were okay. The case of appendicitis brought the vacation to an end and the bad luck on that vaction was added to when some jewelry was stolen from our motel room. However, the treatment for the appendicitis went well and we returned home without any more problems.
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One summer in Estes Park CO area, we camped in Glacier Basin with our trailer. My sister got strep throat and they had to find a dr. and get her some antibiotics, so she was sort of down for the count and no fun. I remember driving up to the top of Trail Ridge, where I expected to see this fabulous view. It was completely socked in with fog, and there was nothing else up there but a tourist shop, not even any food… But the hardest part was, I was 14 and was looking for some other kids my age to hang with, but was too afraid to approach any of the ones I’d seen in the campground. I spent a lot of time sitting on the hood of our car (53 Chevy) leaning back against the windshield and reading Jane Eyre. Not a horrible vacation, mind you, just lonely.
OT – if any of you haven’t read to the end of yesterday, it’s definitely worth the trip. I was teary from laughing…
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This simple little question evoked a wide range of memories, which triggered some thoughts and quite a few small epiphanies, none of which are worth telling. But it it did lead me to the conclusion that this is the worst summer of my life, which means I have had a pretty good life and that I am much less resilient at this age, and no doubt from the level of pain.
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Clyde – sorry it’s been a bummer of a year. I wanted you to know that you have inpsired me recently. Before I was a parent, I used to ride my bike quite a bit. I did RAGBRAI once and the Minnesota TRAM several times and I used to bike to work occasionally, but when the child came along, as a single parent, I gave up riding to work and gradually biked less and less.
Listening to your various biking descriptions, I decided that I should get back to that. So I cleaned up my bike, pulled out my helmet and gloves. I’ve been riding to work and I’ve even taken the dogs out riding a few times. Feels great. Thanks for the inspiration!
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Keep it going, round and round.
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Clyde, so sorry that your level of pain is affecting the quality of your life. Don’t know what’s ailing you, but am wondering if you’ve tried acupuncture?
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I have lots of rainy camping stories to think about except that I like camping in the rain. One time in yellowstone we set the tent late and the skies opened up during the night a river running through the middle of our tent is what we woke up to as the 8 tear old son who was scared to death of vomiting shook me in my sleeping bag so that I would have first hand evidence he was having a food poisoning experience that had projectile excretions coming out of both ends simultaneously
. I started laughing, 5 of us in the tent river and puke and diarreiha to factor into the equation, great vacation , challenging moment
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Sounds memorable alright!
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Of all the vacations I’ve had over the years, only one stands out as a flop, but even so, it had its highlights. It wasn’t a summer vacation, but a five-day respite in late February from the Minnesota winter. Based solely on the recommendation of a lawyer I was working with at the time, we booked our trip, packed our shorts and swim suits and headed for the warmth, sunshine, and sandy beaches of Negril, Jamaica. We imagined romantic dinners of Caribbean food after lazing on the beach and swimming in the ocean all day.
Our flight from Mpls/St. Paul to Montego Bay was full of revelers, most of whom were obviously old hands at this winter vacation bit. Halfway through the flight most everyone on board had changed into shorts and sandals and were partying hardy. In Montego Bay we all piled into an a rickety old bus that would take us to our various destinations on the island. We made numerous stops along the way, and by the time we arrived at our small hotel a couple of hours later, we were the last passengers on the bus. It was late evening, we were dog tired and hungry. The hotel dining room was already closed, but our proprietor, a friendly solicitous fellow, assured us it was no trouble at all to cook a meal for us. Soon a meal of chicken and rice materialized along with a couple of glasses of very sweet wine. The meal, while no culinary masterpiece, was remarkable only for it’s high price, but we didn’t discover that ’till the next morning when we checked out of the hotel. Husband and I were the only paying guests in the hotel, except for a single woman from Minneapolis who apparently spent every winter there, and when we were shown our room it became abundantly clear why. The room was small and without air conditioning or windows, and we were advised that water to the shower and toilet was turned off between 11 P.M. and 7 A.M. Even worse, we discovered, the bed sagged so seriously in the middle that we had to pull the mattress onto to the floor to be able to sleep on it. That night, roaches, and who knows what else, paraded in a steady stream across our sweaty, tired bodies. At daybreak, when the local roosters greeted the new day, we arose determined to find another place to stay for the remainder of our vacation.
We spent the better part of that day trying to locate new accommodations. We chose a rustic resort with a number of small cabins clustered around a large grassy area and a bunch of flowering trees near a rocky beach. We settled into a second story room with windows and a bed we could actually sleep on. All would have been fine were it not for the fact that the remaining cabins were occupied by a rowdy group of Canadian male college students who slept all day and wiled away the nights smoking ganja, drinking Red Stripe beer and playing dominoes with a few locals. Throughout the night the smell of ganja wafted through the open windows along with the sound of dominoes being noisily slammed on the picnic table below our room. At that point we resigned ourselves to not getting much sleep on this vacation.
After a breakfast of freshly squeezed orange juice and fresh fruit, we set out for the beach. Slathered in sun tan lotion, after a refreshing swim, I sprawled on my towel in the sand to relax. That’s when a steady stream of persistent vendors descended on us. Hawking everything from drinks, T-shirts, and jewelry made of seashells, I let a group of four women talk me into braiding my very short hair into corn rows for the modest sum of $20.00. Big, BIG mistake. The following day on a motorcycle trip to some inland caves, the delicate skin on my scalp between the corn rows burned to a painful crisp.
The motorcycle trip itself was an adventure that taught us that we were no match for the local entrepreneurs. It’s a very long story, but suffice it to say that we were bamboozled, hustled and taken advantage of at every turn. Somehow our motorcycle developed a flat tire at the small remote joint where our guide suggested we stop for lunch. But no problem, mon, the locals just happened to have all the needed tools and equipment to fix it. On and on it went. By the time we returned to our room that evening, we had spent a small fortune on tipping the guide at the caves, the musicians who appeared out of nowhere to play for us as I was soaking in the pool at the bottom of the caves, and children swarming around us to have their picture taken, not to mention what we had already spent on renting motorbikes for ourselves and our guide. It was a never ending parade of outstretched hands demanding payment for one thing or another.
Jamaica is a lush tropical island with much to offer. I’d recommend it as a vacation destination to anyone who wants to get high and party for a week, something I wish Ed had told me before we went.
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I hope I never have a vacation like that, Plainjane. I’ve had some bad luck on vacations, but I think that you were really out of luck on that one. .
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my first wife and i went on a oneymon down there in 82 and didn’t find out till we had booked it that the idea of tourism was different there than up north. we were told to be prepared for a horrible time. if you turn on the way back machine sherman you will remember that in 81 economy was so screwed up that the dems decided to right it by raising the interest rate to 21 percent for the simplest loan. credit cards shot up to the 20% range and everyone quit spending. no one had ever heard of such a thing and the first on many roller coaster economic dips was in full motion when we arrived in and the tourist trade had been non existant. we were the tourists and everywhere we went we were treated like royalty. it was very interesting to see what we had been told were terrible and zero give a darn folks that all wanted to win our attention and good favor. felt like true capitalists with the street people looking for a wa to eat and us being the option we had more attention than we wanted. .
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We were there in 89, about one year after hurricane Gilbert had ravaged the island. Destruction was evident everywhere, and I’m sure the Jamaicans were struggling. We too had way more attention than we wanted. The locals we met were not unfriendly, just terribly pushy and aggressive in their pursuit of tourists. In the five days we were there, I don’t recall ever venturing outside without being accosted by someone wanting to sell us something, more often than not, drugs. It was a constant barrage of solicitation that we found extremely tiresome, if not outright unpleasant, especially since some solicitors didn’t take a polite “no thank you” kindly.
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In summer, the song sings itself.
– William Carlos Williams
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you are good at finding the pefect quote. thanks linda
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