Kids shortchanged by early school return

It was sad to see my grandsons trundle off to meet the school bus this week with almost a full month of summer left unexplored.

I remember as a child each spring was followed by that endless summer with all its possibilities for exploration, imagination, friendships and, most of all, fun. I think fun is underrated in society today. I don't mean the fun that we engineer for our children with endless camps – baseball camp, soccer camp, day camp, overnight camp, computer camp and the ever popular band camp.

I am talking about the fun we had as kids when summers went largely unstructured. We had the local municipal pool, and you could meet everybody there. Where I grew up, you had neighborhoods not subdivisions.

We didn't have specialty camps, so we just had days where we organized ourselves for the day according to who showed up and who had the most inventive idea for something to do.

You wanted to see a special friend, you got on your bike and peddled over. (I know, what parent would release a child to the perils of the streets outside a north metro subdivision?) If you didn't feel like seeing your old friends, you could ride down a different street or maybe take a walk in the woods.

I would get a mason jar and some dirt, and in an hour I'd have an ant farm. Found out if you fed them bread, they would die when the bread turned moldy.

The good news was we didn't have mobile phones, computer games or 900 cable channels. We had a mother who stayed home, which meant she wanted us out of the house. So out we would go.

A lot of time was spent at the municipal pool because South Georgia is hot in summer. It's real hot, and it can be humid, too. We would play all sorts of variations on minnows and sharks. We could walk up to the snack bar maybe once or twice.

But the teenagers had cornered the snack bar and reigned supreme over the jukebox. If they deigned to notice at all it was with open hostility, and we were only tolerated long enough to buy an Eskimo Pie. But don't even think about eating it there.

This was where I learned to love rock 'n' roll though, listening to raunchy guitars and the hey-boppa-lulas waft over the water from the shallow side to the deep end.

Once or twice each summer, the adults would gather up me and my brothers and my cousins to go on a picnic. To me it was a safari down the Little River. We would go to a certain place down a rutted dirt road, come to a clearing and stop. But this was only the beginning.

We had to take everything in hand that we would need for the day and tote it down a small winding trail that was canopied in Spanish moss and attended by buzzing insects, and thick, foreboding woods all around.

Just when I thought I couldn't carry the drink box any farther, the path would open up to a sandy white beach (I have no idea where the sand came from), and the dark, almost black water of the Little River flowing by.

And how cool the water was. After the long trek, it was heaven to jump in the river. When we finally emerged from the water there would be hotdogs and hamburgers waiting for us with a cold Coke that I had personally brought to the party.

This was roughing it in style. Sometime late in the day, somebody would talk about the boy who drowned out there one year, a long time ago, and get a lecture about staying close to the family. That is when my brother would silently swim underwater and grab my ankle and pull hard.

I was the only one who didn't think it was very funny. Still don't when I recall it.

Now compare that to cooking out on the deck or even going to the park. Sure, there is a pool for our subdivision, but what adventure is there in going there and maybe meeting the other two kids your age? And your parents are there, for crying out loud.

Well, the schools may get them in earlier every year now, and teach them an extra month's worth of the three Rs. They may bump up those almighty test scores a few more points. But I can tell my grandchildren: Boys, summer just ain't what it used to be.
- Hatcher Hurd, www.northfulton.com

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