The Evolution of Summer
When my MFA professor said at the end of classes in May, “Enjoy your summer break,” I almost laughed out loud. Ok, sure, for a few months I would not need to be on campus, but there was to be no break about it! I am still working full time, training for a marathon (more on that in my next installment), and even writing and reading with the same frequency I was while class was in session.
What does summer mean to me, then? It means worse weather, higher Con Ed bills, and a much more crowded NYC. Sorry to be such a downer, but I am a staunch believer that summer is the worst season of the four, by a mile. But I didn’t always believe this. Of course not.
From the first day we go to kindergarten to the last day of high school, the prospect of summer is flaunted as the light at the end of the tunnel, year after year. We sign HAGS in yearbooks (have a great summer)—or HAKAS (have a kick ass summer), if ya nasty—truly believing that the end of June means freedom of a completely undefinable and unbounded nature. In our heads, we imagine the beach, running through sprinklers, late nights of mosquitos eating us while we eat ice cream, flips flops and sunglasses and short shorts. No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks, etc., etc.
For the most part, we made these imagined summers our real summers. The energy on the last day of school was exhilarating. No, we didn’t throw our papers all over the school as they do in movies (I’m looking at you, High School Musical), but we had parties in the classroom, parties on the bus, romp-arounds with our similarly unchained neighbors when we got home. The anticipation of summer is a steadfast marker of childhood.
In college, summers started evolving. Suddenly, if you couldn’t snag a great, resume-building internship for the season, you felt like a failure. The same cannot really be said of my parents’ generation, but for us, the last few months of each spring semester were spent crafting application after application in the hope that someone would be so kind as to rob us of the warm-weather freedom we used to cherish. If you couldn’t find an internship or steady work, you were left wondering why all your friends decided to sell their souls to capitalism and leave you with summertime sadness.
But now, I’m a working girl. Summer exists in that it suddenly gets a lot stuffier and smellier in NYC, but otherwise, life proceeds as usual. In true adulthood, we are no longer supplied with breaks in the routine; we have to create them for ourselves by taking time off and subsequently fretting about inbox buildup.
But I believe something about those old grade school summers stays with us. Because of all those years celebrating the last day of school, we are hard-wired to understand that summer holds a promise that the rest of the year just cannot accommodate. Despite the remaining presence of work and other year-round obligations, many of us still say, “This summer, I am going to [fill in the blank].” It’s as if summer suddenly grants us more time to do all the things we could not do over the course of the other three seasons, despite the fact that our schedule has not lightened one bit. It’s New Year’s sweaty, sunburned cousin, perhaps.
You know what? Go for it. Arbitrary benchmarks are the lifeblood of adulthood. If you can convince yourself, summer is as good a time as any to set new goals. Read more books, start a new exercise routine, visit a city you’ve never seen before. Sunshine makes people happier, so maybe it makes us more motivated? Just spitballing here.
No matter what you think of summer, what summer has meant to the you of the past, or what plans you have for summers of the future, life’s what you make it, so let’s make it rock. No matter the season. As we grow up, experiences take on different meanings. Summer may not fill us with quite the level of exhilaration that it did when we wore backpacks that weighed more than our hopeful little selves, but it still comes once a year. With that in mind, don’t waste it.