Summer? That's for kids 07.01.2007

My kids, Hannah & Jimmy, are off to Summer camp for two weeks. A proper American Summer camp in Michigan. I say "proper" because we don't have any Summer camps in Scotland and, to my eye, it looks like the ones my sister and I saw in movies and Peanuts cartoons when we were growing up, so it's probably the real deal. That's really all I have to compare it to. By way of extending the stereotype, Hannah's a combination of Peppermint Patty and Lucy, which is to say she's a tomboy who bosses her brother around. Jimmy's a bit of Linus and Charlie Brown, which is to say he's probably miserable. Nonetheless, for them, Summer camp officially marks the start of Summer.

Why isn't there a Summer camp for adults? I put this question to a friend who answered, somewhat tritely, "There is. It's called Club Med" Rubbish, I thought, with the difference between proper (read: kids') camps and boring (read: adults') camps summed as follows. At the East Bank Club in Chicago, there are two outdoor pools: A kids pool and an allegedly adult pool. At the kids' pool, the kids, under the watchful eye of a well-tipped lifeguard, jump, splash, dive and cannonball around to their hearts' content. (By the way, it was here at the EBC kids' pool that my friend Kevin and I invented the pre-MILF term "Yummy Mummy", a term we, as gentlemen, still prefer today ) At the adults' pool, the only people actually in the pool are working out by swimming laps, save for the occasional gaggle of women who enter in only up to mid-thigh, so as not to get their swimsuits wet and splash a little water on themselves. I'm not joking about this. Really. Last Fourth of July, at a bustling, hip boat party down by the lake, a friend, mesmerized by the water, repeated mantra-like "When's everyone getting in the water? When's everyone getting in the water?..." No-one did.

In Summer, we shed our layers of Winter clothing, but replace then with layers of affected coolness. Who's having more fun at the East Bank Club? The kids are in the moment, in the now, in the Summer. The adults are posturing for something ( or, more likely, someone) that may never come.

Frank Zappa was once asked, during a seminar at Berkeley, why he eschewed drugs and alcohol, but chain-smoked cigarettes and chain-drank (?) coffee. He answered: "To me, cigarettes and coffee are food. That may seem like a strange concept here in California where people believe that if they just eat the right foods, they'll live forever." Irony being a specialty of Zappa's, it's appropriate that he died of cancer not long after. As usual though, Zappa was onto something: Living forever's not much fun, if you can't enjoy what's happening right now. Like this Summer happening right now.

In Coppola's adaptation of S.E. Hinton's book "RumbleFish", the owner of the diner, Benny (played by Tom Waits) muses that we measure out our lives in Summers. Then one day we realize how few Summers we have left. Maybe that's it - we don't want to reminded how many Summers we have left, and so we soldier on through the sweltering El trains and uncapped fire hydrants, seemingly oblivious to the season's passing, the passing of time.

I, for one, hate the idea that the reason only kids can enjoy Summer is that they have so many of them left. I may not have too many left and I certainly can't slow them down. So I'd better savor each one.