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Freedom, day one

When you're 14, and school has just letout for the summer, the possibilities are both exhilarating and mystifying.

By JOHN BARRY
Published May 28, 2006

[Times photos: Bob Croslin]

Smore the bunny helps fill Jillian Dixon’s first day of summer break, May 17, particularly when he requires a good hour or so of bunny therapy. “He’s totally out of his routine,” Jillian says.

	Jillian Dixon and her 12-year-old brother, Matt, shoot some hoops to pass the time. She recently completed her final year at Osceola Middle School. “I loved middle school,” she said. “They know you’re still a kid. They help you mature.”
	Sometimes the something to do is something no one wants to do, like emptying the dishwasher. Jillian fulfills her kitchen duty at about noon at her house in Seminole.

SEMINOLE - ON THE FIRST MORNING OF HER SUMMER VACATION, JILLIAN DIXON PLOPPED INTO A FAT FLORAL SOFA IN the living room. She wore jeans and a tank top, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was barefoot. She looked vibrantly alive, as only a 14-year-old can. A blue-sky day beckoned. A whole summer of blue-sky days lay ahead. The possibilities seemed endless. Anything was possible. Anything.

The morning ticked by. Jillian contemplated all her anythings. That's the hardest thing about summer when you're 14 years old: making one of all those anythings into a something.

n n n The day before had been wonderful. It had been Jillian's last at Osceola Middle School, where for three years she had excelled. She had run track. She had been in the National Junior Honor Society. She had worked on the yearbook. Next year, she'll be a high school freshman. Her teachers had hated seeing her go.

"I loved middle school," she said. "They know you're still a kid. They help you mature."

She'd had a yearbook adviser who passionately defended the Dixie Chicks. She'd had a math teacher who set aside Fridays for teaching "lifelong skills." Such as tying animal balloons. Or juggling. Or cutting paper snowflakes.

Her yearbook adviser had asked everyone to write down the "good qualities" of their classmates. Someone had written that Jillian "would most definitely become a soccer mom." Another had said she was "a leader who doesn't follow the crowd."

It's true. Jillian doesn't fit the television image of a teenage girl. She doesn't like malls. She likes country music and Kenny Chesney. She wants to get a Ford truck. She talks about "keeping my priorities straight, like my dad." Her best friend is her 70-year-old grandfather. When "Grandpa Joe" gets a glass of Scotch, he always asks for "three fingers." When Jillian was a baby, she sucked three fingers instead of her thumb. They are soulmates.

Jillian had asked her language arts teacher if he could recommend some

essay ideas she could work on over the summer. She had asked her math teacher if she could keep her algebra book.

"They think I'm the weirdest thing."

*   *   *

Of course they do. Summer isn't supposed to be a time to scribble and compute. It's supposed to be an escape, a respite from alarm clocks and cold cereal at 7 a.m., from pens and pencils and routine and tedium. It's supposed to be a time to sow those wild oats, a time when you don't know Tuesday from Thursday, or 10 o'clock from 2. It's supposed to be the time in your life that you'll dream about for the rest of your life.

How to balance those things against other pressing needs? The need to feel useful. The need to feel connected. The need to feel grown up. The need for attention from those you love most.

*   *   *

At 11 a.m. on her first day of freedom, Jillian heard a ruckus in her bedroom and found her bunny, Smore, freaking out in his cage. Smore raced from one side to the other, banging his head, nearly toppling the cage.

Jillian brought him back to the sofa and lay down again, Smore wrapped in her arms. Her mom, Stacie, reminded her that she had to empty the dishwasher. That wasn't one of the beautiful anythings Jillian had in mind for her first day of summer. "It's a CHORE," she said, morosely. She told her mom she had a traumatized bunny to deal with.

Smore lay on his back, on Jillian's legs. He held his paws up, in the prayer position. He wiggled his nose. "He's totally out of his routine," Jillian said with concern.

Smore and Jillian were like that for about an hour.

Meanwhile, her brother Matt was sitting on the floor of his bedroom. He's 12. The walls of his room are lined with soccer and baseball trophies and baseball pennants. On the floor were all his clothes.

He was supposed to choose which clothes he wanted to take on a weekend camping trip. Like his sister contemplating the dismal prospects of unloading the dishwasher, he contemplated the clothes on his floor for a long, long time.

The morning passed like the turning of a rusty bolt.

*   *   *

At noon, a hopeful burst of motion: Matt swept up his clothes and Jillian unloaded the dishwasher. Both tasks took five minutes. Energized, the two got a basketball and headed out to the hoop in the driveway.

They went at it furiously. Jillian had a height advantage, but Matt can dribble with both hands and behind his back. He went for dunks. The hoop was about 6 feet up. Jillian relied on her fade-away jumpers. They giggled and oomphed and elbowed and wrestled and trash-talked and giggled some more. "Too bad you're so short!" Jillian taunted, firing over his head.

After a half hour, they plopped together under the hoop. Both were sweating.

"What do you want to do now?"

"I don't know. What do you want to do?"

"I don't know."

They sat under the hoop. Down the street, two girls Jillian's age approached. Jillian's smile stiffened. She whispered that one of the girls had been her best friend in elementary school. They no longer spoke to each other.

The two girls walked by, in the center of the street. They stared straight ahead. Jillian looked down.

What happened to the old friendship?

"Middle school," Jillian said.

*   *   *

Jillian hopes to spend most of the summer working in her dad's shop. Tom Dixon runs a business in Clearwater called ComTech Precision Machine Inc. It makes precision parts for boats, ships, race cars. Grandpa Joe and an uncle work there, too. Stacie keeps the books.

Both Jillian and Matt sometimes operate the computerized machinery, feeding in materials and watching as the machines churn out everything from shotgun barrels to baffles for water purifiers. "For years, I've been planning to take over the business, after I get a degree in engineering," Jillian said. "I'm really into that kind of work."

Jillian is into almost everything her dad is into. She's into Fords, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, any kind of machinery, and camping. The family has a new camper and plans a weekend shakedown trip to Crystal River. Soon after, they'll take a road trip to Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. She's begging Dad to stop in Nashville.

She would go every day to the machine shop if she could. "He pays me if I ask him," she said. "Last summer, I didn't ask." She doesn't spend much anyway. "I don't know many people my age who turn down Busch Gardens, but I do. I'd rather go to work."

On her first day of summer, though, her dad was working with heavy steel. He hadn't invited her to come in.

She and Matt remained slumped under the hoop.

"Want to go again?

"I don't know."

"What do you want to do?"

"I don't know."

*   *   *

Jillian has a big sister, Megan, who's 16. "We get along, sometimes," Jillian said. "It's pretty much up to her. If she feels like talking, she calls me into her room. Otherwise, don't bother her."

While Jillian was wheel-less and parked at home on the first day of summer, Megan was out, singing in her school chorus at high school graduation ceremonies in St. Petersburg.

"Megan's favorite part of school is socialization," her mother, Stacie, said. "She's a very social person. The kids all have a hard time in the summer because they reach a point where they miss their friends. But this is the first summer Megan has a driver's license, so she's in a whole new world now."

The afternoon passed like a herd of gopher tortoises. It was now 2 p.m. Jillian and Matt wolfed down pizza rolls for lunch and landed back on the sofa to watch the movie Kicking and Screaming, in which Will Ferrell plays a dad who goes insane coaching his son's soccer team.

Megan breezed in as the movie was ending. She said she'd be going back out in a while. She talked enthusiastically about running into a chef from a restaurant she had just eaten at, where she and her friend had laughed so loud (her friend snorts) they'd created a scene. When she saw the chef again, he asked her, "Don't I know you from somewhere?"

Jillian asked her icily, "How do you know it's the same person?"

"How many short Asians with spiky hair are there in St. Petersburg?" Megan said.

Their mom asked Jillian to check on Matt. He had gone outside, and was in the pool.

Jillian looked out a window. Matt was lying face down on a raft, his head buried in the hole of a blow-up plastic swimming ring.

"See any fish?" Jillian called out.

Jillian got on the family computer in the dining room. She checked MySpace.com. Nothing doing. She checked instant messages. Just one guy from school signed on. The phone hadn't rung all afternoon. It was as though middle school and all her friends there had vanished overnight. "It's hard to keep in touch," she said moodily. She said she wished summer were shorter and Christmas were longer.

Jillian negotiated with her computer friend over a movie to see at Largo Mall that night. They couldn't decide. Besides, neither had a ride. Brother Matt was still in the pool. Still floating, face down, head buried in the swimming ring. Staring at the blue pool bottom.

Dinner would be soon.

The first day of summer had slipped by.

*   *   *

Jillian remembers her favorite vacation. It was during last year's spring break. Her father had to run up to Atlanta to pick up parts. He was just going "straight up and straight back." He wasn't stopping. He asked Jillian if she wanted to come.

In a heartbeat.

"We stopped for gas and snacks, and besides that we kept driving," Jillian said.

"I remember we got so tired we finally had to pull over for a couple of hours. We both fell asleep. Then we both woke up at exactly the same time. We were freezing. So my dad put on the heat.

"We fell asleep again. It got really hot in the truck, until my dad and I woke up again. Again, at exactly the same time!"

Sleepily, father and daughter sat together in the night, shoulder to shoulder in a small truck cab, somewhere between there and here, lost in highway sounds.

"I remember everything about that trip."

John Barry can be reached at (727) 892-2258 or jbarry@sptimes.com.

[Last modified May 28, 2006, 07:54:31]