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A job couldn't spoil the bliss of summer's youthful laziness

By SUE CARLTON
Published July 17, 2006

Been a good long while since I was in school. I walked the halls listening to Duran Duran on a Walkman, not Fall Out Boy on an iPod.

But even now, every year, three little words reverberate for me like the school bells of doom.

Back To School.

This starts offensively early, like those Christmas ads that come out before the jack-o'-lanterns have had time to draw their first fruit flies in the Florida heat.

Midsummer, and they're hustling back-to-school sales on TV and in those newspaper fliers your mother is thumbing through a little too enthusiastically, if you ask me. Uniforms, notebooks, gel pens, school shoes, backpacks. Make it stop.

Because here's the harsh reality, kids. Grownup life generally does not come with summers off. Unless you opt to be a teacher, in which case the size of your paycheck will probably mean you'll take a summer job anyway.

Remember summers off? Sometimes we slept until the day was half over and parents started making threatening noises like Rottweilers, or until a friend with a car showed up. We commandeered tables at McDonald's for hours, wandered the mall, slathered on baby oil at the beach.

Turns out being bored is a luxury. I have no memory of what nothing-to-do feels like.

Not that we didn't work. The first summer I was old enough, I wore one seriously ugly brown-and-orange polyester uniform for hold-the-pickle duty at Burger King. I towered soft ice cream so high on cones at Carvel they toppled over. I served pizzas, nicking the occasional pepperoni.

In a particularly bruising stint working at the skating rink snack bar, I lost a boy I liked to a girl with a french braid during the Couples Skate. (Because he worked at a nearby fish market called, I'm not making this up, the Grumpy Grouper, he always reeked, no matter how much Pierre Cardin cologne he slapped on before he came calling. So all in all, not a total loss.)

One summer I worked the 6 a.m.-to-noon shift serving crullers and coffee in a pink apron at Dunkin' Donuts. There I learned this valuable lesson: something that smells sweet and light and rapturous when you encounter it only once in a while becomes the very odor of aging roadkill under a baking sun once it has permeated your nose, your clothes, your hair, your dreams. To this day I cannot look at a chocolate-frosted.

Don't get me wrong, kids. There are great things about being in the Real World. (The real Real World, not the MTV Real World.) If you're really lucky, you like your job, and there are fewer people around who can tell you what to do.

I think that Travis McGee character in my dad's John D. MacDonald paperbacks had it right. He was this weathered boat bum/hero who worked when money got low. He believed in taking retirement early, or at least in spurts, probably a little too open-ended for most offices.

I was regaling the teenage nieces with tales of my marathon babysitting summer (at a then-outrageous $3 an hour), and the nightmare family that ended it.

They were nice enough, left big bowls of M&Ms and Funyuns and trashy tabloids to read. The kids were not psychotic.

But this family had a CB.

Which they used to call me to check up on things every hour or so. Their "handles" were something like Mama Bear and Papa Bear, or maybe it was Lady Bear and Big Bear. Smokey Bear? It was all so awful.

I was to answer to "Li'l Bit," as in, "Breaker, breaker, Li'l Bit, we'll be doin' a double-nickel and hammerin' down, you copy?" And my poor mortified teenage self would have to answer in the jargon. If I didn't, that CB would squawk, "Negatory!"

My nieces thought this story was hilarious. But one of them, Chiclet-sized cell phone in hand, had a question.

"Aunt Sue," she said, "What's a CB?"

A couple of weeks ago, I admitted to buying a St. Joseph's statue for my sister, whose house would not, would not sell in a cooling real estate market. As the lore goes, bury the statue and buyers will come. I figured, why not.

For those who scoffed, two words: Contract pending.

Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com.

[Last modified July 17, 2006, 01:08:53]