I have been thinking about the summer time when I was a child.

I went to no camps to learn things. There were no areas of study for the summer. We didn't go on vacation. We were on vacation. If we went somewhere it was to visit relatives.

I remember the pool that we set up. It certainly got plenty of use from my sister and myself and many of our friends. I can't remember it being terribly hot, but I imagine that it was pretty oppressive. We went barefoot and the soles of our feet toughened during the summer. I walked down to the creek at the end of our street and the boys and I built dams and caught crawdads and tadpoles. I remember a pool in the woods where there were bullfrogs. They were huge and fearsome looking. I ran with my dog along paths in the woods.

There was no calendar looming over me. There was nothing to prepare for. The days started early with bananas in my cereal, had peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches at lunch, and ended late, listening to the Cardinals game on WLS on my crystal radio set, it's antenna stretched to a tree in the back yard. There were pick-up baseball games, do-nut sales, dogs, cats, and bunnies. We played rolla bat and 500 when we didn't have enough players for a game. Do you know those games? Vicki was one of the best ball players and could hit and throw like a boy. She was also pretty. We played monopoly games in Randy and Vicki's basement. Somehow we stretched the games out for days. They had a collie named Sabre. My friend Lynda had a neat basement. It was cool there and we played records and did the limbo. Bobby and Cathy had a big yard where we played ball games. They also had a play house that was alternately a fort for army games or a house for other games. I learned to play marbles. We drew circles in the dirt and usually didn't play for keepsies. I still have my marbles, many with the wounds of being blasted in those games nearly 50 years ago. We joined boyscouts and went camping, laughing away our weekends in the woods. That must have been a good thing for our parents. I learned to measure the height of a tree or a building from the ground. We built tree forts in the woods and swam at camp 175. We went to church on Sunday and sang hymns. We went to Vacation Bible School and memorized scripture, much of which I still remember, and built bird houses. My dad was one of the bird house building teachers. With special permission we could walk along the highway up to O.C. Conner's store to buy baseball cards with a piece of bubble gum inside. A card with a piece of gum was a penny. For ten cents we could buy a balsa wood airplane that would fly like mad in the wind.

We didn't have community children's theater, computer camp, SAT preparation, dance, cheerleading camp, or much of anything else. We were children and we played all day, every day until labor day. Somehow that was enough in those days. Things were not so competitive as they are today. And we grew up to have jobs and marry our sweethearts, live in nicer houses than our parents.

Maybe we should go back.