On the Internet, people were commenting that they wanted to do a summer like the 1990s. So now you get to hear about what I remember from summers growing up.
My mom used to work during day and my dad would be home with in the days over the summer break. He worked the swing shift, so he told my younger brother and I not to bother him before noon. We used to just hang out in house waiting for my dad to get up to take us to the pool. The rule at the apartments was kids could not swim by themselves until after the age of 14, but before that, they had to have an adult to “watch them.” When we did finally drag him out of the house at 12:01, he used to bring a book and a lawn chair with him. Then he’d fall asleep with it on his face while we swam.
Television back then was only three channels. In the morning they showed news, followed by game shows, followed by soap operas. Boring. Saturday morning had cartoons, which I thought was for children until I became an adult. Now, I realized it was for adults to sleep in while the kids entertained themselves. Smart.
One time, there was a cooking show and my brother and I decided we were going to make something we saw. We managed to start a grease fire. Thankfully, we put it out without burning the house down. We then climbed up onto the countertops and cleaned all the black soot off the ceiling so we wouldn’t get caught. A week later, we saw a fire truck across the street and we thought that the neighbors were some sort of amateurs. “You have to learn how to put your own fires out, people.”
Kids rode bicycles of course, but we also had roller skates and skateboards that we spent hours and hours attempting to master on concrete without helmets or knee or elbow pads. You always saw kids with casts on their arms and legs. In the Northwest, the sun is up really late, so sometimes we played outside after dinner and didn’t come home until after 9 o’clock at night.
We used to walk along road and collect cans and then take them to the corner store for nickels. We spent the handful of change to buy candy from the candy aisle. I remember the pimply clerk, counting out all of our sticky soda cans and yeasty beer bottles. We used to spend hours figuring out the best haul for our earnings.
Somewhere in the mid-90s, my brother got the original Nintendo gaming system. I think he might’ve even bought it himself with paper route money. He played video games for hours on end. I think he had a six-hour game one time. That’s probably the break between Gen X and the Millennials, the home video games. Before that it was public arcade games.
The radio was a big deal then too. I would sit and listen for my favorite songs and try to record them on the cassette tape recorders with a boombox. I spent one tween summer with a neighbor girl calling in to various radio shows trying to win prizes. We won tickets to a ballet, that was the biggest thing we ever got.
When I was an older teenager, I babysat and then worked at McDonald’s. Before I learned to drive, I used to ride the city bus and it took forever. I remember when my first friend got a car. We used to all ride around together listening to her Cranberries CD.