And just like that, summer is back!

Don’t look now but that most dreaded of seasons is upon us again. That’s right friends. Summer is here, in all its sticky air and blistering heat. And as the father of three, I couldn’t be more disappointed. I’ve hated this season with a burning passion for decades now. And each year it gets worse.

It wasn’t always like that though. As a child, summer was the best. It was like Christmas. It took forever to get here, but man when it did! I have so many fond memories of summers past. Of course, at my age, the memories are vague at best. I do remember a few epic ones. And as with us all, there was that one special summer that seemed to last forever. What a summer!

I had a real close group of friends during my teenage years. We called ourselves ‘The Bowl Brothers.’ We did everything together. Jud, Kevin, Carlos, Jon, Kevin, and often times Troy. The Bowl Brothers. And on this particular summer, I was the first one to get my license. I got it at the very beginning of the summer, which meant I was the driver for most of that summer. And most of the girls that we hung out with were a grade behind us, so that made me the driver for the whole gang.

That summer for my sixteenth birthday, my parents got me an Isuzu Trooper 2. It was a great car. And it was perfect for the amount of people I would be hauling around at any given time. The Troop Troop was always stuffed with kids. We’d drive around all day, listening to music and smoking cigarettes. Not a care in the world. And that’s the biggest part of that memory. The carefree feeling of that summer. We were at the prime of our teenage years and we were living our best teenage selves. There were no video games back then. We had absolutely zero reason to stay inside ever. There was no opioid crisis. Nothing to accidentally kill us for no reason. Our biggest worry was trying to score a bag of weed that wasn’t full of seeds. Times were just easier back then. For $5 we could get a pack of cigarettes, 2 bacon double cheeseburgers at Wendy’s, and a pint of Mad Dog. And that made for a perfect summer night.

My childhood was filled with great summers. Every summer my family would go down to Sea Island, Georgia for a week. Those were magical weeks. Weeks that we looked forward to all year long. Other summers were spent on the tennis court, running through drill after drill after drill. Or traveling to some small city to get beat in the first round in some tournament. And then there was the summer of my junior year of high school. I had planned to live with some friends of mine up in Nags Head for the summer. I remember driving up there the first day and when I got there, no one was there and I was able to look around the beach house by myself. It looked like one of those dingy, cinderblock bunkers you always see at the beach, sandwiched between the nice big beach houses with huge decks and windows. It was the darkest, dirtiest, most depressing “houses” I've ever seen. And that was just the outside. When I got inside, the entire house was covered in sand. It smelled like total decay. Everything was wet. Every room was dark and dank. I stayed for about half an hour before my friend got there. I told him there was no way in hell I was staying there for the summer, so I got back in my car and drove home. Of course that meant my summer plans were completely shot to hell, but it turned out to be one of my best summers.

That summer, my best friends Jud, Kevin and Jon would all hop in my Pathfinder and we’d drive to Jud’s beach house at Holden Beach. It was a 2 hour drive and we did it probably at least 3 or 4 times a week. For the entire summer. And all because we were learning how to surf. Keep in mind that NC is not known as a surfing destination. Our waves tend to be weak at best. And Holden Beach is right smack in the middle of the worst stretch of terrible waves. Also keep in mind that this was way before cell phones and the internet. We were flying blind each time we set off for the waves. We hoped for the best. For two hours we’d talk about catching our first wave. And then sure as hell, we get to the top of the bridge over the waterway and we’d get that first look at the conditions, and we’d see a flat, lifeless ocean. The rest of our day would be spent sitting on ours boards looking hopelessly out at the ocean waiting for that first set to come in. It never did.

Those were the summers of my youth. And man, how different the summers are now that I’m an old man. Now summers mean I’m drenched in sweat for the entire day. Delivering packages all day in the brutal heat means you’d better get used to be soaking wet all day. And then there’s the shock I get walking into the buildings with their air conditioning. I get to enjoy the cold air for less than a minute and then its back into the brutal heat. But the biggest thing I hate about the summer is that it’s just like any other time of year, in that all I do is work. No vacation. No free time. No fun outings. The same grind as the rest of the year, only for these 3 months I get to do it in 100 degree weather. The only thing that really gets me through these days are the thoughts that autumn isn’t that far away. The most glorious time of the year. I just have to put my head down and grind, and for that I will be rewarded with October. So here’s to the fall! May it get here as quickly as possible. Because I hate summer…...